Psychology Phd Thesis Length Text

Jonathan Friesen - Writing Coach

Note: please see the update to this blog! the best part about writing a dissertation is finding clever ways to procrastinate. The motivation for this blog comes from one of the more creative ways ive found to keep myself from writing. Ive posted about data mining in the past and this post follows up on those ideas using a topic that is relevant to anyone that has ever considered getting, or has successfully completed, their phd. I think a major deterrent that keeps people away from graduate school is the requirement to write a dissertation or thesis. However, most dont realize that dissertations are filled with lots of white space, e.g. Pages are one sided, lines are double spaced, and the author can put any material they want in appendices.

The actual written portion may only account for less than 50% of the page length. A single chapter may be 30 40 pages in length, whereas the same chapter published in the primary literature may only be 10 or so pages long in a journal. Regardless, students myself included tend to fixate on the appropriate page length for a dissertation, as if its some sort of measure of how much work youve done to get your degree. Any professor will tell you that page length is not a good indicator of the quality of your work. Regardless, i feel that some general page length goal should be established prior to writing. This length could be a minimum to ensure you put forth enough effort, or an upper limit to ensure you arent too excessive on extraneous details.

Its debatable as to what, if anything, page length indicates about the quality of ones work. My advisor once told me about a student in chemistry that produced a dissertation that was less than five pages, and included nothing more than a molecular equation that illustrated the primary findings of the research. Ive heard of other advisors that strongly discourage students from creating lengthy dissertations. Like any indicator, page length provides information that may or may not be useful.

However, i guarantee that almost every graduate student has thought about an appropriate page length on at least one occasion during their education. The university of minnesota library system has been maintaining electronic dissertations since 2007 in their digital conservancy website. Ive developed a data scraper that gathers information on student dissertations, such as page length, year and month of graduation, major, and primary advisor. Unfortunately, the code will not work unless you are signed in to the university of minnesota library system. Ill try my best to explain what the code does so others can use it to gather data on their own. Obviously, this sample is not representative of all institutions or time periods, so extrapolation may be unwise. I also wont be providing any of the raw data, since it isnt meant to be accessible for those outside of the university system.

The first element has the permanent and unique url for each authors data and the second element contains a character string with relevant data to be parsed. The basic approach is to use functions in the xml package to import and parse raw html from the web pages on the digital conservancy. This raw html is then further parsed using some of the base functions in r, such as grep and strsplit. The tricky part is to find the permanent url for each student that contains the relevant information. The code first imports the html, finds the permanent url for each author, reads the html for each permanent url, finds the relevant data for each dissertation, then continues with the next page of 21 authors. The important part is to identify the format of each url so the code knows where to look and where to re initiate each search.

For example, each author has a permanent url that has the basic form university of minnesota ph.d. This code is found by searching the html for words like major or pages after parsing the permanent url by table cells using the lt td gt lt /td gt tags. After the online data were obtained, the following code was used to identify page length, major, month of completion, year of completion, and advisor for each character string for each student. It looks messy but its designed to identify the data while handling as many exceptions as i was willing to incorporate into the parsing mechanism.

Its really nothing more than repeated calls to grep using appropriate search terms to subset the character string. The section of the code that begins with get data using function takes the online data stored as dat on my machine and applies the function to identify the relevant information. The resulting text is converted to a data frame and some minor reworkings are applied to convert some vectors to numeric or factor values.

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The data contained 2,536 records for students that completed their dissertations since 2007. The range was incredibly variable minimum of 21 pages, maximum of 2002 , but most dissertations were around 100 to 200 pages. Interestingly, a lot of students graduated in august just prior to the fall semester. As expected, spikes in defense dates were also observed in december and may at the ends of the fall and spring semesters.

The top four majors with the most dissertations on record were in descending order educational policy and administration, electrical engineering, educational psychology, and psychology. Ive selected the top fifty majors with the highest number of dissertations and created boxplots to show relative distributions. Not many differences are observed among the majors, although some exceptions are apparent.

Economics, mathematics, and biostatistics had the lowest median page lengths, whereas anthropology, history, and political science had the highest median page lengths. The maximum number of students that completed their dissertations for a single advisor since 2007 was eight. Anyhow, ive satiated my curiosity on this topic so its probably best that i actually work on my own dissertation rather than continue blogging. Update: by popular request, ive redone the boxplot summary with major sorted by median page length. Research activities of the e lite group focus on designing, building and evaluating interactive and intelligent system, and testing them in realistic settings. Novel user interaction modalities, empowered by ubiquitous devices, enable the discovery of innovative methods to approach new and existing application domains. We adopt an end to end research approach, where we aim at exploring the whole spectrum, from devices to users, from intelligence to data representation, to develop a systemic approach.

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Currently, the application area in which we are mostly active is ambient intelligence. moreover, we deserve particular attention to the ambient assisted living field, in which accessibility and assistive technologies meets ami. In this domain, we experiment with novel interaction modalities for people with disabilities, with accessible games, and we build wearable and mobile systems for helping caregivers and healthcare assistants. That's why we have been in business so long with many happy customers to show for it.

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If you want our help today, just register with us online and then fill in the order form. In no time at all, one of our writers with an advanced degree in your essay's topic will begin to craft you a superbly written academic paper. Take that initial first step with our services at today and you'll be pleased with the results! join date jan 2001 posts 725 there is currently a discussion going on in another thread about dissertation length. Before i stared on my dissertation, i wanted to have as good a sense as i could about what type of work was accepted at half a dozen well known or well resected regionally accredited institutions. I researched umi and purchased six dissertations of vaguely similar topics or at least similar methodologies. University of washington the dissertations ranged in length from 48 pages to 150 pages.

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Some were very limited lit reviews and others had proportionally longer lit reviews. The bottom line was that all of these respected regionally accredited universities had quite a few qualitative dissertations that were not limited in success by a minimum required page count. We're committed to developing our postgraduates into skilled researchers who can conduct rigorous research using a variety of methodologies and methods. During your first year you may take a range of taught modules including research design and analysis, methodology, theoretical issues, and statistics requirements will vary depending on any postgraduate research training you have already undertaken. You will attend and contribute to research seminars, and through departmental and goldsmiths wide modules you are also encouraged to develop practical skills such as public speaking, poster preparation, scientific writing, and how to deal with the media. You meet regularly with your supervisor at every stage, and develop a structured approach to designing, executing, analysing and writing up your research.

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