Guides
Written for residents who have to satisfy a regulation, a deadline and an examiner at the same time. Every entry carries the date it was written, so you can see how current it is before you act on it, and names the published instrument wherever it rests on one.
Regulations
Regulations
Part one
What your registering body actually requires of the thesis, and the dates that are not yours to move. Read these before you choose a topic, not after.
No. 01
6 min read
What the 2023 Post Graduate Medical Education Regulations actually say about your thesis: marks, examiners, deadlines, research activity and what changed in 2024.
No. 04
5 min read
Protocol in 180 days, thesis by 26 months, cut-off dates, page limits, fees and what happens when assessors ask for modifications.
No. 17
5 min read
Who sets the rules for each qualification, how timelines and submission routes differ, what a DM or MCh dissertation adds, and what is the same everywhere.
Design
Design
Part two
The decisions that settle whether a thesis can be finished at all: a question your department can actually enrol, a sampling method you can describe honestly, and a number you can defend at the viva.
No. 06
6 min read
A feasibility checklist used by our senior doctor panel: patient load, ethics, cost, equipment, time and the novelty test.
No. 07
6 min read
What the chapter is for, how to search PubMed with MeSH terms and Boolean operators, how to read for the gap, and how to structure it from general to specific.
No. 12
6 min read
Simple random, systematic, stratified, cluster, consecutive and purposive sampling: which are honest in a hospital study, and how sampling changes your sample size.
No. 03
8 min read
The four formulas most postgraduate theses need, with worked examples and the values you are expected to justify.
Approvals
Approvals
Part three
Nothing may be collected before approval, and a prospective interventional study is registered before the first participant is enrolled. Both are refusals that cost months, and both are avoidable on paper.
No. 09
6 min read
Every document an IEC submission needs, what committees send back and why, consent for vulnerable groups, waiver for record-based studies, and data confidentiality.
No. 10
5 min read
What CTRI is, why a prospective interventional study must be registered before you enrol the first participant, and why submissions get queried and sent back.
Data
Data
Part four
The master chart is designed before the first patient, not after the last. Get its columns right and the analysis is a choice between named tests rather than a rescue operation.
No. 11
7 min read
One row per participant, one column per variable: coding conventions, missing data, date formats, version control, and getting the file ready for SPSS or R.
No. 08
6 min read
A decision path for postgraduate data: how many groups, paired or independent, what kind of outcome, and whether it is normally distributed — plus what a p value means.
Writing
Writing
Part five
How the synopsis and the discussion are built section by section, how references are set in the style your university asks for, and how similarity is brought down by writing rather than by tricks.
No. 02
7 min read
A section-by-section template for the postgraduate synopsis: title, introduction and need for the study, aims and objectives, methodology, sample size and references.
No. 13
5 min read
The structure that works: principal finding, comparison with the literature, mechanism, honest limitations and what follows, and how to stop repeating your results.
No. 14
5 min read
Numbering in order of first appearance, the formats for an article, book, chapter, web page and thesis, the six-author rule, and using a reference manager safely.
No. 05
5 min read
Why medical writing repeats standard phrasing, what counts as acceptable overlap under the UGC 2018 convention, and how a word-level check finds a risky passage while a chapter is still in draft.
Submission
Submission
Part six
Why theses are sent back, what the examiners ask and how to answer it, and what it takes to turn a finished thesis into a paper worth submitting.
No. 16
6 min read
Objectives that do not match the analysis, sample sizes with no justification, ethics approval dated late, templates ignored: the common reasons, and the fix for each.
No. 15
5 min read
How to open in two minutes, the questions asked almost every time, how to answer one you cannot answer, and how to prepare from your own thesis rather than a list.
No. 18
7 min read
What changes between a thesis and a manuscript, how to judge a journal honestly, the ICMJE authorship criteria, writing a cover letter, and answering reviewers properly.
Provenance
Provenance
Provenance
Not from us. Every statutory statement in the register is referred back to the instrument that makes it, and where your own university ordinance is stricter, the ordinance wins.
Five published instruments govern almost everything a postgraduate thesis has to do: the Post Graduate Medical Education Regulations, 2023[1] for MD and MS, the NBEMS thesis guidelines[2] for DNB and DrNB, the UGC plagiarism regulations of 2018[3] for similarity, the ICMR national ethical guidelines[5] for approval and consent, and the ICMJE recommendations[4] for authorship and referencing. Where a guide rests on one of them it names it in the text, and the reference at the foot of that guide links to the issuing body rather than to a circular whose address will have moved by next year. A guide that rests on none of them — a statistical method, say — carries no reference apparatus at all rather than a borrowed one.
A guide is a general account of a published rule. It is not an opinion on your study, your department or your university's own template, and it cannot be, because none of those are in front of us while it is being written. Where a guide and your ordinance disagree, follow your ordinance and tell us, so that the guide can be corrected.
Each entry carries the date it was written. We would rather you read an older guide and check the date than read an undated one and assume it is current.
Instruments referred to across the register
MDThesis works to these published standards. It is not affiliated with, approved by, accredited by or endorsed by any of the bodies that issue them, nor by any university.
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Document: Guides register · Revision 1 · Last reviewed
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