The purpose of a thesis paper explores the reasons why you are writing this paper and what you hope to accomplish in the end. The purpose of your Master’s thesis paper can:

Your target audience are the people who will read your paper. By knowing who your target audience is, you have an idea about what their background might be and how to tailor the content and language of your Master’s thesis paper. It can also help you narrow down a general topic into a specific subject. The specific subject should be relevant to your target audience interests or to build their knowledge.

In a graduate program, your primary target audience will be your counselor or professors, medical or scientific professionals. Anyone involved in the final grading of your Master’s thesis paper is considered your primary target audience.

The Master’s thesis paper can also be submitted for publication in professional organization journals. For example, two professional organization journals for physician assistants are:

These professional organization journals accept papers from both students and licensed professionals. Writing articles for publication will be part of your professional medical career. Click on the links above to see what their requirements are for submission of research or Master’s thesis papers. If you are interested in publishing your Master’s thesis paper, please discuss it with your counselor or professors.

When the Master’s thesis paper is published in professional journals or online, your primary target audience can be any medical or scientific professionals or patients searching for a concrete diagnosis or alternative treatments.

The topic that you choose must be in the general field of medicine. The topic:

As you research or begin to analyze literature sources, you may find out that the chosen topic is not ideal. Consider changing your topic when:

There must be a recent medical discovery or finding about your topic. It cannot re-iterate or summarize information from Wikipedia, online clinical/patient websites, published books or medical/patient pamphlets. When in doubt, your topic should answer all the three questions below:

Websites to search for NEW medical discoveries or findings:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/news/health_medicine/

http://www.scientificamerican.com/infectious-diseases

http://www.breakthroughdigest.com/

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/sections/biology-biochemistry/

http://www.discoverymedicine.com/

You can also search for your topic using medical specialty fields. Click on the following links to begin your search:

OR

If you are interested in metabolic disorders, please click on any of the links below:

Skim through references/bibliography sections for published literature that interests you. Write or print published articles that interest you.

As you search for your topic, you must organize, interpret, evaluate and print/write the results of your search. Your topic can be narrowed down to a specific subject depending on the type of literature sources found during your general topic search. To help you narrow your topic to a specific subject, enter the number of literature sources you have found/collected for each of the categories in the table below.

Other questions to consider when narrowing your topic are:

Match each of the four aspects with their corresponding supportive evidence or data on the left column. The pair that has the highest number is your specific subject. Save this table for future reference. This table can provide you with other aspects to study for your thesis paper without changing published references or the topic.

Below are some helpful website links to help you search for peer-reviewed published literature: