PhD dissertation lengths

John Nash, research mathematician at Princeton University and the subject of the movie "A Beautiful Mind," submitted a 28-page dissertation on game theory to complete his PhD. It won the Nobel prize in economics in 1994.

 

Academic writing? Feh.

Well, not really "Feh" but for my living over the last decade and more I have had to read, analyse, summarize and evaluate thousands and thousands of pages of legal writing, some of it by academics and more of it by wanna-bes.

It's hard work.

Good writing is succinct, clear, and focused. When there is a page limit, the best writers don't push it. The poorer ones use tricks to get around it.

The idea of a page minimum horrifies me.

 

The committee has much to do with length as well. What will they tolerate? How much clout does your chair have? In some places the chairs drive the bus, and the department/institution just ride.

On the issue of research methods, qualitative is also very good at identifying new variables for quantitative studies to test...an often overlooked strength of qualitative research.

 

Interesting point. Most doctoral dissertations/theses are pretty wordy. If the research sees the light of day as journal articles, most editors will rigorously pare down the word count - and it's interesting to see the quality improve when that happens.

 

The European-style research PhD I completed via a South African institution was 336 pages (459 cited sources in the bibliography).