Formatting your thesis: Appendices & supplemental material

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Introduction

Appendices provide supplementary information to the main thesis and should always appear after the references/bibliography. If you are unsure about whether content should be included in the thesis or in an appendix, consult with your supervisor. The thesis and appendices must be uploaded in a single file.

For more information about appendices, please see the Thesis Template Instructions.

Note: Signatures, personal phone numbers, or personal email addresses (ones that contains part of a person’s name) must be redacted from your thesis. This means that the text is fully removed, and cannot be copied & pasted out of the document.

If including copyrighted materials as appendices, see Copyright at SFU.

Materials included in appendices

Examples of material included in appendices are as follows--also refer to Formatting Help.

  • interview questions
  • participant letters / forms  
  • surveys / questionnaires (if not your own work, these require copyright permission)
  • supplemental tables / figures / graphs / image

Supplemental material

If you have material that cannot be included within your document (data, audio, video, hi-resolution images, embedded media (ie. GIFs)), or any hyperlinks to data that has a destruction timeline as per Ethics, you can upload supplemental material files to your library submission record (in addition to your thesis document). The maximum file size for each file is 2GB. If you have a larger file size, please contact data-services@sfu.ca.

If you are including supplemental material in your submission, you must also include an appendix within your thesis document, which contains an overall description of the subject matter, credits, and file name(s). This assists in “linking” your document to any additional supplementary material, as well as providing further information and context about the file(s).

  • Audio and video files
    • Upload .mp3 (audio) and .mp4 (video) files for embedded playback at the document's Summit page
    • Summit supports H.264 HD video
    • Lossless audio (.wav, .aif, .flac) can be packaged into a zip file for download.
    • Appendix examples:
  • Data files
    • raw data (.txt), Microsoft Excel (.xls and .xlsx), and zip file (.zip)
    • Appendix examples:

It is recommended to upload the best file formats to allow for data files to be preserved in the most straightforward way, so that they remain usable through software upgrades and changes in the computing environment. More information can be found at Research Data Management (RDM)'s website for more information about the handling and organization of data during your research.

Order of appendices

Appendices appear in the order in which they are introduced in the text.  

Appendix headings

You may include one appendix or a number of appendices.

If you have more than one appendix, you would letter each accordingly (i.e., Appendix A, Appendix B, etc.). Write your appendix headings in the same manner as your chapter headings.

Formatting help

If you have content from other documents that you’d like to include as appendices, you can either:
  1. Transfer the text and re-format using the template styles as necessary, or 
  2. Convert the documents into images and insert them into your document, one image per page.
Consult with the Theses Office if necessary, and determine which method would be best for your content. Keep in mind that text converted into images cannot be searched or copied and pasted, and may not be as clear to read as transferred text. However, sometimes content cannot be easily formatted for a Word document, so as long as the content is readable, converting to an image is another option.
 
Please see the Thesis Template Instructions for further assistance in appendix formatting, or contact the Theses Office.