Don’t know how to structure your thesis? Analysing existing PhD theses is the key.
When I teach sessions on planning, writing and completing your thesis one of things everyone wants to know is how to structure their thesis, and it’s a question I just can’t answer. Each discipline, research area, and indeed thesis topic is so different that it is difficult to give an ‘overview’ or ‘how to’ in terms of thesis structure, as it has to be particular to and appropriate for your work. Should your literature review be an individual chapter, or incorporated in to individual topic chapters? Should you methodology be part of your introduction? How many theme or topic chapters should a thesis have?
Vitae have some really useful suggestions on how to decide on a structure for your thesis, which you can look at in detail here. The best of these, and the one that I discuss at length in my teaching sessions, is analysing existing theses. The benefit of analysing existing theses is that it lets you in to discipline-specific structural possibilities, and can help you identify the pros and cons of different approaches.
Most Universities have open access repositories now where anyone can download PhD theses. Ours at Exeter is called ORE – Open Research Exeter. If you want to look a bit further afield, you can download or request electronic copies if theses from Universities across the country from Ethos – the British Library’s e-theses online service.
So, when analysis existing theses, what should you be looking at? Vitae can help here to. You can start with an overview by asking the following:
How many chapters?
How long is each chapter?
How have key sections like the introduction, literature review, methodology and conclusion been dealt with?
(Vitae, 2015)
As part of their Part-Time Researcher workshop, Vitae break this down even further to analyse thesis writing at a micro, mid and micro level. This involves looking at the following:
Macro level:
Structure
Signposting
Mid level:
Linking between chapters
Repetition
Micro level:
Paragraph structure
Sentence structure
Choice of words
(Vitae, 2009)
At all levels, the key issues to look at are:
how originality is shown
how the gap in knowledge is shown
how certainty/uncertainty is acknowledged
how weaknesses in the work are dealt with
style variation in the thesis (introduction through to further work)
what were the author’s reasons/objectives for writing that way
how is the writer’s voice shown
what writing do you like/dislike and why?
(Vitae, 2009)
The above can be used as a taxonomy for analysing thesis structure and writing more generally, and as a way in to thinking about how to approach writing up your thesis.
The truth is, reading existing theses can help you answer a multitude of questions throughout your doctoral studies. Want to know what a literature review looks like in your subject area? Look at existing theses. Want to improve your academic writing? Read existing theses. Want to know what the pass standard is for a PhD thesis in your subject? Look at recently submitted theses in your department, or, even better, a recently submitted thesis examined or supervised by your internal or external examiners.
In completing literature reviews students are often very focused on traditional forms of scholarly literature – journal articles and mongraphs – when, in actual fact, neither is structured or written in the same way as a PhD thesis. They are a unique form of writing up research in the academic world. So if you want to succeed in your doctoral studies, I suggest you read other people’s theses.
