Less important results

Sometimes, not all your results need to be included in your result section. You should be selective about what results you present in your thesis. You will probably end up conducting several analyses and get results that end up completely irrelevant for your thesis and therefore should not be emphasized. You may also end up with no significant results of an analysis, but it may be important to show that you have looked at this. Maybe you put a lot of effort into the analysis, but at the same time, you know it will just take space from your more interesting and significant results. If you do not include it in your thesis at all, however, your examiner may question why you did not analyze this. The perfect solution is to include it in your appendix or supplement material.

Appendices or supplements

Appendices or supplements present additional results and details that are not necessary to present in the main part of your thesis or research paper. These may be some of the details in your methods that are not necessary to present in order to understand what you did or analysis you conducted just to check the validity of your methods. It might be full transcriptions of interviews you conducted or detailed specifications of equipment and photos. You may also get some insignificant results that turned out to be less important, and therefore can be placed in the appendices with only a short mention in the main part of the thesis. Insignificant results are not a cause in itself to down-prioritize them to the appendix. A master thesis may contain insignificant results and it may be very interesting to discuss why they are insignificant. If you, however, have several other significant results to discuss, and you are not planning for an interesting discussion on why they were insignificant, placing them in the appendix may be a good idea.

Format

There are many ways to make an appendix or supplements, and NMBU does not have any specific guidelines on how to do it. Remember that the appendix must be printed out with the rest of your thesis, which involves a significant printing cost. Try to limit the length of it and prioritize what extra information you need to present there. It is up to you if you want several appendices, or if you want to collect everything into one section. Your appendix should be placed at the end of your thesis after your reference list.

Rules for referring to and presenting tables and figures are the same in the appendix as any other part of your thesis. The figures and tables should be labelled, and they must be referred to somewhere in the text of your thesis, either in the main part or in the appendix itself.

Related resources

What to include in an appendix

Formatting an appendix