What Is PhD Thesis?

The PhD thesis is the most essential component of a doctoral research degree: it is the culmination of three or four years of full-time labour aimed at creating an original contribution to your field of study.

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With a large word count, the pressure of producing something new, and, of course, the potential of defending it at a viva once you’ve finished, your PhD dissertation can appear to be a scary proposition.

This blog will provide you an overview of all you need to know about writing a PhD thesis, including tips on structure, feedback, and submission.

Commencing your PhD Thesis

The literature review will usually be the initial stage of your Ph.D. thesis. We’ve already provided a comprehensive guide to what a Ph.D. literature review entails, but here’s what you should know about this stage of your research:

• The literature review is an opportunity for you to demonstrate your expertise and comprehension of what has already been written about your research topic – this could include papers, articles, books, data, and more.
• Instead of just reporting what other scholars have stated about your topic, you should try to evaluate and examine their ideas.
• The literature review is usually the first job in your Ph.D. programme, and it is usually the first portion or chapter of your dissertation.

You’ll go on to the bulk of your Ph.D. dissertation when you conclude your literature review. Of course, you’ll go back to the lit review at some point to make sure it’s up to date and includes any new information you’ve discovered during your research.

PhD Thesis Research

The fact that your Ph.D. thesis should reflect an original contribution to academic knowledge sets it different from past university work. Your discipline will have a big influence on the shape this original contribution takes.

• Dissertations in the arts and humanities typically entail examining a variety of texts, sources, and theoretical frameworks.
• Surveys and case studies in the social sciences are more likely to be qualitative or quantitative.
• Experiments are designed, recorded, and analyzed in STEM topics, with the results used to verify or refute a predefined theory.

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Depending on the nature of your research, you may choose to ‘write up’ your findings as you go or wait until the ‘writing-up’ time, which normally occurs in your third year of study. Whatever way you choose, take thorough notes on your sources and approaches — it’ll make your life a lot easier when it comes to citing sources in your dissertation later on.

PhD Thesis vs. Dissertation

Although the phrases ‘thesis’ and ‘dissertation’ are frequently used interchangeably, they have distinct meanings:

• Your argument is your thesis. It’s the conclusions you’ve reached after conducting a literature review and integrating it with the findings of your own original study.
• Your dissertation is the written statement of your thesis. This is where you organize your facts in a way that displays and confirms your conclusion in a systematic manner.

PhD Thesis Structure

After you’ve done your initial literature evaluation and original research, you’ll move on to the following phase of your doctoral dissertation, sketching up a plan for your thesis.

The format and content of your thesis will differ depending on your field, although many dissertations follow this general template:

• Introduction: This section outlines the project’s main goals, why the work is important, and what the work’s original contribution to knowledge is. You can also summarize the next chapters at this stage, providing a synopsis of the argument you’ll construct later.
• Literature Review: In most cases, the introduction will lead to a summary of your literature review. You’ll describe the scholarly context for your project in this section. You’ll identify where previous research has influenced your Ph.D., but you’ll underline how unique your work is.
• Chapters: You’ll begin the bulk of your dissertation after you’ve done introducing your study. This will summarize your findings and begin to illustrate the argument you’ve developed as a result of them. Some PhDs will also include methodological chapters and/or a re-creation of the data you’ve collected. Others will develop your case in phases, citing sources and results as appropriate.
• Conclusion: The dissertation will come to a close with a concluding chapter that ties together the various components of your thesis and the evidence you’ve presented. You’ll restate the project’s importance (and its all-important original contribution to knowledge). You might also use this time to acknowledge the possibilities for further research or applications of your results outside of academia.
• Bibliography and Appendices: You’ll need to add a bibliography at the end of your thesis with a complete list of the books, papers, and data you’ve cited. You may also need to include an appendix with supplementary material.

Length of a PhD Thesis

A Ph.D. thesis varies in length depending on the discipline, although they are all much longer than those for undergraduate or master’s degrees. Your university will usually specify a maximum length – often between 70,000 and 100,000 words, with the majority of dissertations falling somewhere in the middle.

STEM theses will, on average, be slightly shorter than those in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences.

Varied institutions (and departments) will have different policies about what counts toward this word count, so be sure you know what to expect. Check with your supervisor to see if your dissertation’s word count includes references, bibliographies, or appendices.

Writing Up Your PhD Thesis

There’s only one thing left to do after you’ve done your research and decided on your thesis: write it down. This final stage of a PhD is appropriately referred to as the ‘write up period.’

This is when you will complete your final dissertation, which will serve as the foundation for your viva voce exam. The nature of this Endeavour varies from one PhD to the next.

You may already have a big number of chapter draughts and other materials in some circumstances. As a result, ‘writing up’ becomes a process of re-drafting and putting this effort together into a final dissertation. This method is widespread in Arts and Humanities fields, where Ph.D. students progress through stages of a project while writing.

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You could, on the other hand, have spent the majority of your PhD collecting and analyzing data. If that’s the case, you’ll need to ‘write up’ your results and conclusions to create your final dissertation. This method is more popular in STEM fields, where experiment design and data gathering are more time consuming.

Whatever method you use, you’ll now have a persuasive and coherent statement of your case that’s ready for scrutiny.