Hey,

I am very close to finishing my thesis. Literally just waiting for the green light from my primary supervisor as he reads my first chapter and conclusions.

One of my chapters is based on a publication of mine. When proof-reading last night, I realised that one figure was never referenced in text and is not really needed. The figure is a scatter plot of some errors versus some other metric. What is important from this figure, is the correlation between the variables. These are all listed in text and these stats are referred to later in the chapter.

I have decided to remove the figure as I think it helps with the formatting of the chapter and doesn't add any substantial information.

Is this okay to do? Do thesis chapters have to be exactly the same as the papers they are based on? I guess I am examined on my thesis, so if they really want it, I can add it in later?

Your thesis can be anything you want it to be - you don't have to include everything you did in a paper or you can add extra stuff. If someone were to compare my thesis with one of my papers they would find I'm saying one thing in one and something else in another - they are actually both true, it's just for the thesis I am using the whole data set and for the paper I am using a selection of the data set. This wasn't planned, it was just when I was writing the paper a year after submission I realised that some things should have been excluded initially.