(PhD/DBA) Dissertation quantity?

Dear members.

I´d be interested in seeing any Doctoral Dissertation from an accredited university from an English speaking country.

Do you know an internet database or knowledge ressource or anything like that where you can find dissertations, at best in a business area (Marketing, Management, International Business, etc.)?

I´ve heard that British doctoral dissertations are far more extensive in content than American ones? Is that true?

I´d be very thankful for your help.

Greetings from Germany,

Trigger

 

If I can bring this up without starting a debate about parapsychology (it's the only dissertation I have bookmarked at the moment):


I just ran across Paul Stevens's Ph.D. dissertation, done through the Koestler Parapsychology Unit of the University of Edinburgh. Warning: It's 4MB, and in PDF format. But on the plus side, it's structurally typical of an average British Ph.D. dissertation, so it should give you an idea of how they're put together.

Dissertation length varies from country to country. My understanding is that it works something like this:

South Africa: Usually 50,000 to 75,000 words.

UK: Usually 60,000 to 80,000 words.

Australia: Usually 80,000 to 100,000 words.

This is not a hard-and-fast rule; I've seen some Australian dissertations that run significantly less than 80,000 words, and some British and South African dissertations that run significantly longer than 80,000 words. But this should give you a general ballpark figure.

Good luck!


Peace,

------------------
Tom Head
www.tomhead.net

 

Dissertations can be ordered either through UMI or at www.contentville.com. Contentville allows you to search the UMI database and view a little bit of each dissertation's abstract before ordering.

You can also order dissertations through a university's library via inter-library loan.

You can also find dissertations people have posted on the internet by using a search engine.

You can also check out dissertations at university libraries.

Finally, there are some schools that post some of their dissertations on their websites. I think Northcentral has done some of this.

Good luck.

Rich Douglas

 

Keep in mind that many U.S. doctoral programs are partly a "taught" degree, requiring up to two years in formal study of advanced topics, and naturally have a reduced emphasis on the dissertation. You can look at the www.nova.edu site to see examples of this paradigm.

Here are two (1, 2) dissertations that I had bookmarked. There is an abstract of the second one if you'd rather read it before downloading the PDF file.

Both of these are education-related..

 

Thank you all!

South Africa: Usually 50,000 to 75,000 words.

UK: Usually 60,000 to 80,000 words.

Australia: Usually 80,000 to 100,000 words.



How much would then a typical U.S. Dissertation be?

I must admit that I do have some problems in counting in words - in German speaking countries you normally count in pages (e.g. 60-80 pages for an MBA master thesis is quite normal, or 15 pages for a regular mid term paper.

Paul Steven´s British Dissertation is 200 pages long, but INCLUDING abstract and ToC and stuff like that (that is NOT included in German standards; it´s counted seperably in Roman numbers)

Ordering dissertations via a German University Library will be hard work, I guess, so I´ll just keep on searching the Internet for DBA/Business PhD-disses. Maybe someone else got an idea?

Thanks again, anyway! You are really a great help, as always.

 

As said earlier, the U.S. doctorate is partly taught, partly research. In the sciences, dissertations tend to be shorter, social sciences/education longer, fine arts longer still. In business, I would expect to find dissertations ranging from 125 to 300 pages, with about 175-200 the midpoint. Those figures put you in the ballpark, but they are by no means meant to be strictly applied.

Rich Douglas

 

In my own experience at Fielding, students are *very much* DISCOURAGED from "counting words". Walking through Fielding's library of dissertations is interesting. Some are quite thick, while others very slim.

I suspect that this is the case with most RA Ph.D. programs (USA). The emphasis is on quality not quantity.

As well, I'm convinced that - in regards to formal research - *less* words is more difficult to accomplish than *more* words.

Barry Foster

 

I usually use www.contentville.com to learn about dissertations. They have access to 1,500,000 of them, with quite a good search engine. You can read an abstract for free (and learn how many pages they are), then order a PDF version, instantly, for about $25.

 

I had the same experience at Duke several months ago. I perused the shelves of dissertations, which were housed in the basement level against a back wall (WOW! Is this where all of my research will end up? At Potch's library and on my bookshelf? ). Some Ph.D. dissertations were 350 pages, many others were just over 100.

Russell

 

thanks.

but:
At the request of the author, access to these materials is limited to the Virginia Tech campus network only.

(at all the marketing dissertations I tried)