Best practices for research papers, theses, and dissertations: structure, citation accuracy, tone, and revision habits that survive peer review.
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A plain language summary is a different document with a different reader, and the habits that make a good abstract, density, precision, hedging, work against you here. What to do with technical terms you cannot cut, whose reading-level target to actually follow, and a worked conversion from abstract to plain language.
Most UK universities never set one referencing style. The decision sits at department or module level, so the real answer lives in a handbook or library guide, not in a guess based on your subject.
MLA refuses to call ChatGPT an author, so a Works Cited entry for it opens with your own prompt instead. Here is the six-element order MLA actually uses, its own worked example, and the shortened-prompt form the in-text citation takes.
A rewriter that treats (Smith, 2020, p. 44) as ordinary prose will mangle it. Here is what actually breaks in APA, MLA and IEEE citations when a paragraph gets humanized, and what a citation-safe pass has to do differently.
A university AI policy rarely matches the one at the institution next door. This piece maps what five universities, five publishers, and the Committee on Publication Ethics actually say, with the wording quoted and the source named.
Most guides tell you to pick a topic, research it, then outline it, which is true and not very useful. Here is the same advice worked through one real example, from a vague idea to a finished outline, including the moment it forks into a hypothesis or a thesis statement.