Alternative format protocol for for candidates registered in the Faculty of Medicine and Health

• One of the included manuscripts should have been accepted for publication but it does not need to have been published at the time of the submission of the thesis;
• Another included manuscript should have been submitted and should have received either an invitation to revise and resubmit or a potential acceptance subject to major revisions;
• Other included manuscripts should be developed, formatted and close to being ready for submission.

An alternative format thesis should contain an introductory section locating the work to its reviewed peer literature and describing the overall research design and data acquisition / material collection and analysis solutions in order to bind the included manuscripts into a single whole. The integrating material preceding the included manuscripts should not exceed 15000 words in length and it should contain its own list of references. The thesis will need to be based on a uniform page layout throughout: this includes formatting the text of the included manuscripts so that they use the same font size, line spacing, margins, referencing etc. practices as the rest of the thesis. Each manuscript shall also include its own list of references.  If the manuscripts included into an alternative format thesis have already been accepted for publication and have progressed through production in the publication outlet, a pre-proof stage manuscript should be included into the thesis.  When publications are or are to be complemented with supplementary material in print or online publication outlets, the material should be presented as appendices of the thesis.

• an appropriate introduction: which describes the context of the research, the rationale of the investigation, the strategy employed during the research and demonstrated in the thesis, locates the research to its context and establishes its novelty and contribution; and
• an extensive critical discussion and conclusion: to support the published material and link these together into a coherent body of work and indicating directions for future work.

• A title page, intellectual property and publications page, acknowledgements page, abstract, contents and list of abbreviations as for a standard thesis (’Published material to be included in the alternative style of doctoral thesis’ section).
• Introductory materials (see the ‘Critical discussion to link the published material into a coherent whole’ section) – normally limited to 15,000 words and incorporating a Literature Review either as a discrete chapter or as part of a larger introduction - locating the work to its reviewed peer literature and describing the overall research design and data acquisition / material collection and analysis solutions in order to bind the included manuscripts into a single whole
• Manuscripts (see the ’Published material to be included in the alternative style of doctoral thesis’ section): The three or more published/accepted/developed manuscripts should be inserted following the introductory material. Each manuscript will contain sections on introduction, methods, results and discussion as per peer-reviewed work in the field. However, these manuscripts must be supplemented by the inclusion of additional results and methods, including full experimental details, so that the work could be repeated. This will often mean providing more detail than in a standard publication and may be along the lines of supplementary material from any publication. However it should be integrated into the thesis so that these details are easily found. Examples may include highly detailed methods that were omitted from the published work, or background experiments or experiments where system optimization is carried out.
• Discussion and conclusions (see the ‘Critical discussion to link the published material into a coherent whole’ section) - to support the published material and link these together into a coherent body of work and indicating directions for future work. Normally limited to 10,000 words and including a general discussion that brings together and synthesizes the body of work as a whole.
• Appendices - appendices should be provided as appropriate and may contain supplementary information to the published work where necessary.
• References/bibliography as for a standard thesis (see Results, methodology and other sections of the thesis)

• One complete version of the thesis in pdf eThesis format (full text including all publications)
• One edited version of the eThesis with any publications redacted where it has not been possible to obtain permission for re-publication of the work in the eThesis from the journal/publisher. In these cases the eThesis must include some form of place holder to indicate the publication has been removed with a link/reference (preferably DOIs for journal articles and ISBNs for books) to the original publication source.