How long should a dissertation be? That question bothered many graduates who decided to go in for a doctoral course. The answer about the length of that work cannot be simple. Different schools and sometimes even various faculties may have variable requirements about how long it should be.
In some cases, no demands about the number of pages in a doctoral paper appear at all. What matters the most in that kind of academic text is the rigor and the format. But still, students will feel more confident when knowing their doctoral work to be long enough and fall within a certain frame.
A General Recommendation
Authors who professionally create cheap dissertations have one standard recommendation for every doctoral candidate. The point is to maintain a proper balance. Writing a surprisingly short paper may cause your examiners to think you didn’t complete it. On the other side, overextending the length may bore them far before they finish checking the text.
What is the Minimum Length of a Dissertation?
There are no particular standards anyone could mention. Different dissertations in different schools and even departments might have various length demands. There also are universities not specifying any requirements. Professors usually just advise Ph.D. applicants to keep their dissertation as long as it is required to defend their research successfully.
In some other establishments, the requirements sometimes differ. For instance, departments of art and sciences at the particular school may specify the minimum length of a work, while the economy school won’t do that.
Another useful tip from professionals tells candidates to perceive their paper as the very first academic book they publish. Books regularly contain several hundred pages, but not fewer than 100.
Dissertation Contents and Format
When treating your work as a book, you should not forget that academic books have particular format standards. So, your paper should keep up with them as well. Typically, university scientific officials expect students to create a title page, an abstract, a content table designed and organized as intended, a bibliography, and notes. In some schools, they may want students to index their serious papers.
In case such points as notes, indexes, and the bibliography should be written, they can save you. Using them can add some pages to make the paper long enough without overextending the contents. On the other side, there also are universities not including such pages into the overall count. Concluding the point, you should find out the exact demands of your university before you end with the dissertation and send it for approval.
Committee: Approval and Guides
No matter how long your dissertation is, a committee definitely has to check it. They will give their approval if everything’s fine. A committee reviewing the work includes your adviser together with a minimum of two more faculty members.
As a rule, they care more about the contribution you can make in the field with the paper than about how long the dissertation is. Nevertheless, keeping up with the demands is still critical. Producing really remarkable research meeting the approval may turn it possible for you to provide a bit shorter paper. But still, breaking the guidelines is risky.
Dissertation Goals or How to Hit the Target
The point is that the dissertation aims towards contributing something new to knowledge in a specific academic field, no matter how long it is. After the approval, the paper will then go to the library of your university to serve as reference material future students and researchers could use to do their works long enough.
So, the critical feature is the research quality. Putting it to length requirements, the paper with only 120 pages within the 200-paged minimum demand might be not deep or broad enough. Potentially, a student failed to examine substantial questions or add critical aspects of the research to such a text.
In case a work lacks several dozen pages instead of one or a couple of those to be long enough, the committee members and reviewers may consider it as something incomplete. Be advised: adding lots of fluff and wordy passages is not a solution in this case. Making the text long through adding “water” into it on purpose is not something you can hide from your professors. You should know that such efforts will not be tolerated.
The additional way to check the requirements and to know how long a dissertation should be is practical. Students can spend some time in the school's library and check topical dissertations which were previously published. Try to examine how other candidates kept up with the length requirements. They succeeded in the trial you are about to pass through, so using their experience could be wise and effective.
How Long Does It Take to Complete a Dissertation?
Ph.D. candidates usually start their doctoral research within the program while being in their second year or even earlier. The coursework of such programs ends typically along with the third year of studies, even though the Ph.D. grade may take four to eight academic years to accomplish a degree. Even the most hardworking, efficient, and organized Ph.D. students usually spend up to three years to complete their main academic paper. They include two part-time years and one full-time year.
Completing the long dissertation faster is possible if you go in for a topic which is familiar and exciting to you. A regular candidate has their dissertation topic common with that they did coursework in. Choosing a different topic means typically additional time spent to explore new fields of knowledge. For a candidate obtaining a Master's degree, it is an excellent option to use their previous thesis as the ground. Saving a year of part-time work is pleasant, isn't it?
Any kind of fellowships, jobs, or internships chosen in the process of dissertation writing should have something in common with the research field. These are possibilities which candidates might use to increase the time of research, add some length to a dissertation of the appropriate quality within the shortest time.
