Ross Woods, rev. 2018, '20-'23
The dissertation demonstrates the student's ability to fly solo
doing a major research project.
The steps below can be spread out over the time available according to the time each one should take, making a schedule. However, you cannot be so rigid in your work habits. Read and work ahead if you can, for several reasons:
• First, much of the work takes reflection.
• Second, many students have difficulty keeping to a schedule; they tend to start slow and let the work pile up so that there is too much to do in the final stages.
• Third, you might often need to revise work from past weeks.
• Fourth, you should plan and work ahead for coming weeks.
Your supervisor will probably assign you specifc tasks or goals, and expect you to send them in on schedule. If you are running late with a task for any reason, please contact your supervisor for an extension before it is due. It would be polite to give a reason and report your progress.
As a graduate student, you need maintain your own motivation and follow a disciplined study routine that works well for you.
It's easy to get stuck, and your tutor is available to help you. We expect you to ask for help, and say as clearly as you can what is causing your difficulty. Tell us if these materials are unclear so we can revise them for future editions.
Please note that one rigid procedure does not easily encompass both professional projects and research topics. It also does not easily encompass different kinds of contrasting methodologies. Consider these:
• Positivistic methods, which have tightly defined hypotheses (perhaps with sub-hypotheses), and independent and dependent variables
• Ethnography
• Documentary studies (e.g. literature, theology, philosophy)
This guide mainly presumes that your thesis or dissertation is primarily based on fieldwork, and the fieldwork guidelines are fairly easy to apply to laboratory work. However, if you are writing on a topic using a documentary analysis approach, you and your supervisor will need to adapt some parts of this guide. Most of this guide also applies to projects based on fieldwork.
A research work is an effort to create new knowledge. There is no definitive definition of new knowledge
and it varies according to the field of study. It can refer to a scientific experiment based on an issue that is either not yet known or about which there are unresolved contrasting views. It can also be a test of existing knowledge, or application in a different context. In other cases, it refers to an analysis and critical review of literature in order to reach a new conclusion.
A project is a task that demonstrates expertise that significantly contributes to professional practice. It needs to be ambitious enough to match the degree level. Projects always have an beginning and an end, even if the end
is to bring it to stability so that it can continue on afterwards. An evaluation is essential. In education, projects might be the establishment of an innovative new program, or to teach a new university subject.
To some extent, research and projects can overlap. When a study is applied or implementational, it might be classified as either as research or as a professional project.
Different kinds of theses and projects have different criteria:
In some graduate programs, students are required to teach an undergraduate course and write it up as a project. At each stage, students’ preparation needs approval to progress to the next stage. Then, when they teach, a senior person supervises them and observes them teaching. Students are required to:
In some cases, a textbook can make a suitable project, and the main part of the project is a textbook. The project must also contain an introduction and a conclusion, between them demonstrating the innovativeness and educational rationale behind the textbook. Students must also include the results of field-testing to show that the instructional approach is effective. In higher degrees, the textbook ight be required to offer something more than a simple re-expression of existing information.
You can best prepare when you have other people with whom you can discuss your ideas. You will find strengths and weaknesses in your ideas that were not otherwise visible simply by articulating them clearly. Use conference times to share ideas in a forum atmosphere.
Some colleagues will synergize with you, push your ideas much further along, direct you to new books and articles, and really encourage you. Others will ask you difficult questions and try to prove you wrong. At least they are pushing you to do better in thinking through your ideas.
You will be able to do more and better if you are accountable to your supervisor. They can keep you encouraged, make deadlines, and keep you on track. However, students working inside non-academic institutions are sometimes accountable to people who are unsupportive. They don't have researcher temperaments and don't understand your project. They might think it is too technical, obscure, academic, rationalistic, or time-consuming. They might be practical people who want to get things done even if they make preventable mistakes.
On the other side, accept that work is largely solitary. You cannot do it without spending time alone in reading, writing, and thinking. And you alone are responsible for the work you submit and for keeping motivated.
Students writing Masters theses usually have only one supervisor and the arrangement is quite simple.
Doctoral programs are usually quite different, and a doctoral supervisory committee comprises at least three people. In some institutions, each student is expected to approach faculty members and put together his/her own committee. In others, the Head of Department appoints the committee when the student has submitted a statement of area of interest and the research committee approves the student’s application for the research program. However the comittee is formed, the final composition of the committee needs the approval of the Head of Department or the research committee.
One of the committee members is appointed chairperson, who is also responsible to make sure the supervision process is as successful as possible. He/she is often the first port of calll for solving any problems that might arise. One person, usually but not always the Chairperson, is appointed the supervisor for most of the day-to-day supervision, and has most routine contact with the student. This is the person with whom you will regularly meet. The others contribute expertise relevant to the topic so that together they have all expertise required to supervise and assess the student on that topic, and they are free to co-opt help and advice from others if they wish. If the topic is interdisciplinary, the committee will normally include a specialist from those relevant disciplines. Some institutions routinely add experts with specialist expertise, such as methodology or statistics.
The best committees are very helpful, and give good support and advice. They can also help you finish sooner. For example, they might return draft chapters quickly with useful comments, and give advice that prevents you from wasting time.
In some institutions, students and all committee members are free to communicate with each other. In others, chairs have the power to require that all student communications with other committee members go through the chair. This works well only if the chair is a good communicator and supervisor. (The cause for this arrangement might be that other committee members are paid for only a limited amount of time in supervision.)
In all day-to-day supervision, the supervisor approves the student's work. In most institutions, however, the full committee must must agree and give formal approval at particular stages for the student to be permitted to progress. The stages vary between insitutions, but the following is a general guide:
Besides that, supervisors normally approve specific sections before the student may continue. For example, if one of the committee members is a statistician, students should not continue past statistical sections until the statistician gives approval. Other institutions have chapter-by -chapter approvals.
In many universities, research students have many problems with supervisors who disagree with each other, and students are normally powerless in such situations. For example:
professional judgment in the fieldbut another might want a set of statistics to prove the correctness of the decision.
If discussions are fruitless, some of your options are, in order of preference:
It is normally considered bad practice to change committee members except in extraordinary circumstances, for example, if the committee member is incapacitated (e.g. sick), proven unethical, or sacked. If committee members retire, they normally continue supervising their doctoral students until finished. Although a student may ask the committee to replace a committee member, it is only possible if he/she can present a compelling case.
You can join social media groups that give free support for research writers. Members are usually other doctoral students and academic staff.
It is probably a good idea to have a writing buddy, for several reasons:
Make sure you have the right hardware:
Make your software choices early, and familiarize yourself with it. Generally speaking, Microsoft Office or LibreOffice will do the job very well. However, word processors vary greatly in how well they write mathematical or chemical formulas, and those who do so often might prefer to use LaTex.
If you can't already type, it is recommended that you learn to do so. If you can type but only slowly, you might take time to speed up your typing. It will save time in the long run.
If your school already has a specific document template for a thesis, it will save you lots of work.
You should also master the “styles” feature. That means that the font and layout for each kind of text is already defined, e.g., different kinds of headings, regular paragraphs, long quotations, footnotes, bibliography, table of contents. If you are not used to using styles, most of your layout problems will derive from either not using styles or pasting in text with incorrect style.
A specialised language checker is helpful. The word processors check spelling, some grammar, and punctuation but the specified checkers might do better. Grammarly is quite good and is the flavour of the month, but it costs.
You will probably also benefit by using Zotero to do your references and bibliography (free from http://zotero.org/). It is one of several kinds of programs that do this, and different users have different preferences. (As a personal opinion, I prefer to learn the style guide so I don't need that software, but I think I'm in the minority.).
If you follow a Harvard reference system you can install Zotero, and install the style “Open University - Harvard” format from the Zotero Style Repository. Zotero will create an acceptable format for references and bibliographies. This will save you many days of work in typing, proofreading, and correcting. It will also prevent unintentional omission of bibiography items.
You can also use Zotero to simplify and speed up your data analysis. Use it to organize research information, including sorting items into collections and tagging them with keywords.
If you do interviews, you might need to have them transcribed to be able to analyze them. Consider this free transcription software: Express Scribe. (Links opens new windows.)
Start reading on your topic as soon as possible, collecting relevant articles, and making notes of your ideas.
If your research needs ethical approval, do not start field research before you get it. Use that time wisely to draft your ideas for any other parts of the dissertation that you can foresee.
The workflow is often not strictly a set-by-step, linear process, and it is better to think of a series of non-rigid stages. For example:
stepsare, you cannot write a dissertation without first having experience in simpler writing tasks. 1
__________
1. Adapted from The EVent mANager
Ross Woods. Draft 2nd ed., 2013.
As you go, consider which parts might make good journal articles, because a good publishing record might be helpful later in your career if you go into academia.
Dissertations are also distributed in other ways that are not the same as general publication. It is common that students must give their institution the right to make copies at least for their own library purposes. Many institutions have a system for placing dissertations in their institutional research repository.
The student usually owns copyright, but there are some obvious exceptions. First, the student does research in a commercial organization. In this case, the researcher might be a paid employee and the employer owns copyright, or has otherwise signed an agreement that hands over copyright. Second, the work has been published in whole or part and copyright is then owned by the publisher. Check the publication agreement; copyright might revert back to the author if the work goes out of print for a defined period. Third, some institutions might expect copyright ownership as a condition of being a student, although I've never heard of it.