Occasionally I need to refer to my master's thesis itself in its text, e.g. in the sentence "These rules are sufficient to compute any differential in this ____".
I was wondering which of the following terms are appropriate to fill the gap: paper, thesis, text, work.
It's not a paper because this term usually denotes journal articles.
You can use the term thesis or the more generic work, instead.
I personally referred to mine as a study, or more specifically "the current study" (text or work would fit as well). This was you can avoid using the first person. Examples:
Thesis and work are widely used terms. I would use thesis to refer to the text itself, and work to refer to the actual work that has been done, prior to the writing, which is reported in the thesis; e.g. the experiments, implementation, process, etc.
Text would also be correct but I have not encountered it very often in the context of science and engineering.
I have also seen the term book used for this purpose. Usually this is within theses of which many copies are printed as books and circulated.
I would argue that paper is not a correct term to refer to a thesis.
"document" seems to be a good general solution.
