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Literatures in Spanish & Portuguese: Assistance with Writing, Citing, and Managing Citations

An introductory guide to doing research in Spanish and Portuguese language, literature, and cultural studies.

Writing Assistance Services

A great resource for writing assistance is the Teaching & Learning Commons (located in the Library), which is the Executive Vice Chancellor's executive branch for advancing teaching and learning excellence via two synergistic programmatic strands: instructional development for educators and student academic support.

Find out how to access and aquire Free Microsoft software as a UCSD Student.

How to Cite - Tools, Tricks, & Tips for Managing Citations

The "How to Cite" Research Guide is an indispensable guide to citation manuals, citation management systems, avoiding plagiarism, and more.

See also the Quick Guides for the

Chicago Manual of Style: This provides examples for various types of foot/endnotes and bibliography citations such as books, book chapters, journal articles, websites, and more.

MLA: This provides an interactive template to demonstrate and assist in creating various kinds of citations.

APA: This provides examples for various types of foot/endnotes and bibliography citations such as books, book chapters, journal articles, websites, and more.

Templates and Guides for Writing Dissertations and Theses

Depending on the nature of your research project (particularly if it involves working with people via interviews or surveys -- or if it involves using human data -- such as health information) you may need to get approval from UCSD's Institutional Review Board (IRB).  This link takes you to a webpage with much information about the UCSD IRB process and has links to the forms, etc. you will need as you move along.  

There are various resources that can help you organize and format your thesis.

1. UCSD provides documentation for preparing graduate theses and dissertations which may help -- see especially Section III: Organization of Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses is probably most helpful, but this also provides very specific detail about specific sections (ie abstracts, acknowledgments, the use of images and statistics, etc.) -- not so much the overall structure and not specific to undergrads.

2. Looking at completed UCSD Theses and Dissertations can also be helpful:

  • All UCSD theses and dissertations can be found in the UC-wide repository e-scholarship.  Unfortunately it's currently impossible to do an advanced search to limit to certain programs or themes.  

3. There are also additional resources to find undergraduate theses: