Writing your dissertation introduction, conclusion and abstract
It’s fair to assume that because the abstract and introduction are the first chapters to be read by someone reading your dissertation, it means they must be written first also. But in reality, this isn’t the case. You’ll actually be far better off writing your dissertation introduction, conclusion and abstract after you have written all the other parts of the dissertation.
But why?
Firstly, writing retrospectively means that your dissertation introduction and conclusion will ‘match’ and your ideas will all be tied up nicely.
Secondly, it’s time-saving. If you write your introduction before anything else, it’s likely your ideas will evolve and morph as your dissertation develops. And then you’ll just have to go back and edit or totally re-write your introduction again.
Thirdly, it will ensure that the abstract accurately contains all the information it needs for the reader to get a good overall picture about what you have actually done.
In this guide, we’ll run through each of these chapters in detail so you’re well equipped to write your own. We’ve also identified some common mistakes often made by students in their writing so that you can steer clear of them in your work.
The Introduction
Getting started
As a general rule, your dissertation introduction should generally do the following things:
Provide preliminary background information that puts your research in context
Clarify the focus of your study
Point out the value of your research
Specify your specific research aims and objectives
While the ‘background information’ usually appears first in a dissertation introduction, the structure of the remaining three points is completely up to you.
There are opportunities to combine these sections to best suit your needs. There are also opportunities to add in features that go beyond these four points. For example, some students like to add in their research questions in their dissertation introduction so that the reader is not only exposed to the aims and objectives but also has a concrete framework for where the research is headed. Other students might save the research methods until the end of the literature review/beginning of the methodology.
In terms of length, there is no rule about how long a dissertation introduction needs to be, as it is going to depend on the length of the total dissertation. Generally, however, if you aim for a length between 5-7% of the total, this is likely to be acceptable.
Your introduction must include sub-sections with appropriate headings/subheadings and should highlight some of the key references that you plan to use in the main study. This demonstrates another reason why writing a dissertation introduction last is beneficial. As you will have already written the literature review, the most prominent authors will already be evident and you can showcase this research to the best of your ability.
The background section
One of the main purposes of the background section is to ease the reader into the topic. It is generally considered inappropriate to simply state the context and focus of your study and what led you to pursue this line of research.
The reader needs to know why your research is worth doing. You can do this successfully by identifying the gap in the research and the problem that needs addressing. One common mistake made by students is to justify their research by stating that the topic is interesting to them. While this is certainly an important element to any research project, and to the sanity of the researcher, the writing in the dissertation needs to go beyond ‘interesting’ to why there is a particular need for this research. This can be done by providing a background section.
You are going to want to begin outlining your background section by identifying crucial pieces of your topic that the reader needs to know from the outset. A good starting point might be to write down a list of the top 5-7 readings/authors that you found most influential (and as demonstrated in your literature review). Once you have identified these, write some brief notes as to why they were so influential and how they fit together in relation to your overall topic.
You may also want to think about what key terminology is paramount to the reader being able to understand your dissertation. While you may have a glossary or list of abbreviations included in your dissertation, your background section offers some opportunity for you to highlight two or three essential terms.
When reading a background section, there are two common mistakes that are most evident in student writing, either too little is written or far too much! In writing the background information, one to two pages is plenty. You need to be able to arrive at your research focus quite quickly and only provide the basic information that allows your reader to appreciate your research in context.
The research focus
The research focus does two things: it provides information on the research focus (obviously) and also the rationale for your study.
It is essential that you are able to clarify the area(s) you intend to research and you must explain why you have done this research in the first place. One key point to remember is that your research focus must link to the background information that you have provided above. While you might write the sections on different days or even different months, it all has to look like one continuous flow. Make sure that you employ transitional phrases to ensure that the reader knows how the sections are linked to each other.
The research focus leads into the value, aims and objectives of your research, so you might want to think of it as the tie between what has already been done and the direction your research is going. Again, you want to ease the reader into your topic, so stating something like “my research focus is…” in the first line of your section might come across overly harsh. Instead, you might consider introducing the main focus, explaining why research in your area is important, and the overall importance of the research field. This should set you up well to present your aims and objectives.
The value of your research
The ‘value’ section really deserves its own sub-section within your dissertation introduction. This is because it is essential to those who will be judging the merit of your work and demonstrates that you have considered how it adds value.
The biggest mistake that students make is simply not including this sub-section. The concept of ‘adding value’ does not have to be some significant advancement in the research that offers profound contributions to the field, but you do have to take one to two paragraphs to clearly and unequivocally state the worth of your work.
There are many possible ways to answer the question about the value of your research. You might suggest that the area/topic you have picked to research lacks critical investigation. You might be looking at the area/topic from a different angle and this could also be seen as adding value. In some cases, it may be that your research is somewhat urgent (e.g. medical issues) and value can be added in this way.
Whatever reason you come up with to address the value added question, make sure that somewhere in this section you directly state the importance or added value of the research.
The research and the objectives
Firstly, aims and objectives are different things and should be treated as such. Usually, these have already been created at the proposal stage or for ethical clearance of the research project, so putting them in your dissertation introduction is really just a matter of organisation and clarity.
Typically, a research project has an overall aim. Again, this needs to be clearly stated in a direct way. The objectives generally stem from the overall aim and explain how that aim will be met. They are often organised numerically or in bullet point form and are terse statements that are clear and identifiable.
There are four things you need to remember when creating research objectives. These are:
Appropriateness (each objective is clearly related to what you want to study)
Distinctness (each objective is focused and incrementally assists in achieving the overall research aim)
Clarity (each objective avoids ambiguity)
Being achievable (each objective is realistic and can be completed within a reasonable timescale)
In creating research objectives that conform to the above, you may want to consider:
Starting each objective with a key word (e.g. identify, assess, evaluate, explore, examine, investigate, determine, etc.)
Beginning with a simple objective to help set the scene in the study
Finding a good numerical balance – usually two is too few and six is too many. Aim for approximately 3-5 objectives
If you can achieve this balance, you should be well positioned to demonstrate a clear and logical position that exudes competence.
Remember that you must address these research objectives in your research. You cannot simply mention them in your dissertation introduction and then forget about them. Just like any other part of the dissertation, this section must be referenced in the findings and discussion – as well as in the conclusion.
This section has offered the basic sections of a dissertation introduction chapter. There are additional bits and pieces that you may choose to add. The research questions have already been highlighted as one option; an outline of the structure of the entire dissertation may be another example of information you might like to include.
As long as your dissertation introduction is organised and clear, you are well on the way to writing success with this chapter.
The Conclusion
Getting started
Your dissertation conclusion will do one of two things. It may fill you with joy, because it signals that you are almost done. Or it may be a particularly challenging test of your mental strength, because by this point in the dissertation you are likely exhausted.
It is your job at this point to make one last push to the finish to create a cohesive and organised final chapter. If your concluding chapter is unstructured or some sort of ill-disciplined rambling, the person marking your work might be left with the impression that you lacked the appropriate skills for writing or that you lost interest in your own work.
To avoid these pitfalls, you will need to know what is expected of you and what you need to include in your successful dissertation conclusion chapter.
There are three parts (at a minimum) that need to exist within your dissertation conclusion. These include:
Research objectives – a summary of your findings and the resulting conclusions
Recommendations
Contributions to knowledge
You may also wish to consider a section on self-reflection, i.e. how you have grown as a researcher or a section on limitations (though this might have been covered in your research methods chapter). This adds something a little different to your chapter and allows you to demonstrate how this dissertation has affected you as an academic.
Furthermore, just like any other chapter in your dissertation, your conclusion must begin with an introduction (usually very short at about a paragraph in length). This paragraph typically explains the organisation of the content, reminds the reader of your research aims/objectives, and provides a brief statement of what you are about to do.
The length of a dissertation conclusion varies with the length of the overall project, but similar to a dissertation introduction, a 5-7% of the total word count estimate should be acceptable.
Research objectives
The research objectives section only asks you to answer two questions.
These are:
1. As a result of the completion of the literature review, along with the empirical research that you completed, what did you find out in relation to your personal research objectives?
2. What conclusions have you come to?
A common mistake by students when addressing these questions is to again go into the analysis of the data collection and findings. This is not necessary, as the reader has likely just finished reading your discussion chapter and does not need to go through it all again. This section is not about persuading, you are simply informing the reader of the summary of your findings.
Before you begin writing, it may be helpful to list out your research objectives and then brainstorm a couple of bullet points from your data findings/discussion where you really think your research has met the objective. This will allow you to create a mini-outline and avoid the ‘rambling’ pitfall described above.
Recommendations
The purpose of a recommendations section is to offer the reader some advice on what you think should happen next. Failing to include such information can result in the loss of marks. Including these recommendations as implicit suggestions within other parts of the brief (e.g. the analysis/discussion chapters) is a good start, but without having a detailed explanation of them in the conclusion chapter, you might be setting yourself up for failure.
There are two types of recommendations you can make. The first is to make a recommendation that is specific to the evidence of your study, the second is to make recommendations for future research. While certain recommendations will be specific to your data, there are always a few that seem to appear consistently throughout student work. These tend to include things like a larger sample size, different context, increased longitudinal time frame, etc. If you get to this point and feel you need to add words to your dissertation, this is an easy place to do so – just be cautious that making recommendations that have little or no obvious link to the research conclusions are not beneficial.
A good recommendations section will link to previous conclusions, and since this section was ultimately linked to your research aims and objectives, the recommendations section then completes the package.
Contributions to knowledge
The idea of ‘contributions to knowledge’ largely appears in PhD-level work and less so at the Master’s level, depending of course on the nature of the research. Master’s students might want to check with their supervisor before proceeding with this section. Ultimately, in this section, the focus is to demonstrate how your research has enhanced existing knowledge.
Your main contribution to knowledge likely exists within your empirical work (though in a few select cases it might be drawn from the literature review). Implicit in this section is the notion that you are required to make an original contribution to research, and you are, in fact, telling the reader what makes your research study unique. In order to achieve this, you need to explicitly tell the reader what makes your research special.
There are many ways to do this, but perhaps the most common is to identify what other researchers have done and how your work builds upon theirs. It may also be helpful to specify the gap in the research (which you would have identified either in your dissertation introduction or literature review) and how your research has contributed to ‘filling the gap.’
Another obvious way that you can demonstrate that you have made a contribution to knowledge is to highlight the publications that you have contributed to the field (if any). So, for example, if you have published a chapter of your dissertation in a journal or you have given a conference presentation and have conference proceedings, you could highlight these as examples of how you are making this contribution.
In summing up this section, remember that a dissertation conclusion is your last opportunity to tell the reader what you want them to remember. The chapter needs to be comprehensive and must include multiple sub-sections.
Ensure that you refresh the reader’s memory about your research objectives, tell the reader how you have met your research objectives, provide clear recommendations for future researchers and demonstrate that you have made a contribution to knowledge. If there is time and/or space, you might want to consider a limitations or self-reflection section.
The Abstract
An abstract can often come across as an afterthought by students. The entire dissertation is written and now there are only a few hundred words to go. Yet the abstract is going to end up being one of the most influential parts of your dissertation. If done well, it should provide a synopsis of your work and entice the reader to continue on to read the entire dissertation.
A good abstract will contain the following elements:
A statement of the problem or issue that you are investigating – including why research on this topic is needed
The research methods used
The main results/findings
The main conclusions and recommendations
An abstract generally should be only one neat and tidy paragraph that is no more than one page (though it could be much shorter). The abstract usually appears after the title page and the acknowledgements.
Different institutions often have different guidelines for writing the abstract, so it is best to check with your department prior to beginning.
When you are writing the abstract, you must find the balance between too much information and not enough. You want the reader to be able to review the abstract and get a general overall sense of what you have done.
As you write, you may want to keep the following questions in mind:
1. Is the focus of my research identified and clear?
2. Have I presented my rationale behind this study?
3. Is how I conducted my research evident?
4. Have I provided a summary of my main findings/results?
5. Have I included my main conclusions and recommendations?
In some instances, you may also be asked to include a few keywords. Ensure that your keywords are specifically related to your research. You are better off staying away from generic terms like ‘education’ or ‘science’ and instead provide a more specific focus on what you have actually done with terms like ‘e-learning’ or ‘biomechanics’.
Finally, you want to avoid having too many acronyms in your abstract. The abstract needs to appeal to a wide audience, and so making it understandable to this wider audience is absolutely essential to your success.
Ultimately, writing a good abstract is the same as writing a good dissertation; you must present a logical and organised synopsis that demonstrates what your research has achieved. With such a goal in mind, you can now successfully proceed with your abstract!
Many students also choose to make the necessary efforts to ensure that their chapter is ready for submission by applying an edit to their finished work. It is always beneficial to have a fresh set of eyes have a read of your chapter to make sure that you have not omitted any vital points and that it is error free.
It’s fair to assume that because the abstract and introduction are the first chapters to be read by someone reading your dissertation, it means they must be written first also. But in reality, this isn’t the case. You’ll actually be far better off writing your dissertation introduction, conclusion and abstract after you have written all the other parts of the dissertation.
But why?
Firstly, writing retrospectively means that your dissertation introduction and conclusion will ‘match’ and your ideas will all be tied up nicely.
Secondly, it’s time-saving. If you write your introduction before anything else, it’s likely your ideas will evolve and morph as your dissertation develops. And then you’ll just have to go back and edit or totally re-write your introduction again.
Thirdly, it will ensure that the abstract accurately contains all the information it needs for the reader to get a good overall picture about what you have actually done.
In this guide, we’ll run through each of these chapters in detail so you’re well equipped to write your own. We’ve also identified some common mistakes often made by students in their writing so that you can steer clear of them in your work.
The Introduction
Getting started
As a general rule, your dissertation introduction should generally do the following things:
Provide preliminary background information that puts your research in context
Clarify the focus of your study
Point out the value of your research
Specify your specific research aims and objectives
While the ‘background information’ usually appears first in a dissertation introduction, the structure of the remaining three points is completely up to you.
There are opportunities to combine these sections to best suit your needs. There are also opportunities to add in features that go beyond these four points. For example, some students like to add in their research questions in their dissertation introduction so that the reader is not only exposed to the aims and objectives but also has a concrete framework for where the research is headed. Other students might save the research methods until the end of the literature review/beginning of the methodology.
In terms of length, there is no rule about how long a dissertation introduction needs to be, as it is going to depend on the length of the total dissertation. Generally, however, if you aim for a length between 5-7% of the total, this is likely to be acceptable.
Your introduction must include sub-sections with appropriate headings/subheadings and should highlight some of the key references that you plan to use in the main study. This demonstrates another reason why writing a dissertation introduction last is beneficial. As you will have already written the literature review, the most prominent authors will already be evident and you can showcase this research to the best of your ability.
The background section
One of the main purposes of the background section is to ease the reader into the topic. It is generally considered inappropriate to simply state the context and focus of your study and what led you to pursue this line of research.
The reader needs to know why your research is worth doing. You can do this successfully by identifying the gap in the research and the problem that needs addressing. One common mistake made by students is to justify their research by stating that the topic is interesting to them. While this is certainly an important element to any research project, and to the sanity of the researcher, the writing in the dissertation needs to go beyond ‘interesting’ to why there is a particular need for this research. This can be done by providing a background section.
You are going to want to begin outlining your background section by identifying crucial pieces of your topic that the reader needs to know from the outset. A good starting point might be to write down a list of the top 5-7 readings/authors that you found most influential (and as demonstrated in your literature review). Once you have identified these, write some brief notes as to why they were so influential and how they fit together in relation to your overall topic.
You may also want to think about what key terminology is paramount to the reader being able to understand your dissertation. While you may have a glossary or list of abbreviations included in your dissertation, your background section offers some opportunity for you to highlight two or three essential terms.
When reading a background section, there are two common mistakes that are most evident in student writing, either too little is written or far too much! In writing the background information, one to two pages is plenty. You need to be able to arrive at your research focus quite quickly and only provide the basic information that allows your reader to appreciate your research in context.
The research focus
The research focus does two things: it provides information on the research focus (obviously) and also the rationale for your study.
It is essential that you are able to clarify the area(s) you intend to research and you must explain why you have done this research in the first place. One key point to remember is that your research focus must link to the background information that you have provided above. While you might write the sections on different days or even different months, it all has to look like one continuous flow. Make sure that you employ transitional phrases to ensure that the reader knows how the sections are linked to each other.
The research focus leads into the value, aims and objectives of your research, so you might want to think of it as the tie between what has already been done and the direction your research is going. Again, you want to ease the reader into your topic, so stating something like “my research focus is…” in the first line of your section might come across overly harsh. Instead, you might consider introducing the main focus, explaining why research in your area is important, and the overall importance of the research field. This should set you up well to present your aims and objectives.
The value of your research
The ‘value’ section really deserves its own sub-section within your dissertation introduction. This is because it is essential to those who will be judging the merit of your work and demonstrates that you have considered how it adds value.
The biggest mistake that students make is simply not including this sub-section. The concept of ‘adding value’ does not have to be some significant advancement in the research that offers profound contributions to the field, but you do have to take one to two paragraphs to clearly and unequivocally state the worth of your work.
There are many possible ways to answer the question about the value of your research. You might suggest that the area/topic you have picked to research lacks critical investigation. You might be looking at the area/topic from a different angle and this could also be seen as adding value. In some cases, it may be that your research is somewhat urgent (e.g. medical issues) and value can be added in this way.
Whatever reason you come up with to address the value added question, make sure that somewhere in this section you directly state the importance or added value of the research.
The research and the objectives
Firstly, aims and objectives are different things and should be treated as such. Usually, these have already been created at the proposal stage or for ethical clearance of the research project, so putting them in your dissertation introduction is really just a matter of organisation and clarity.
Typically, a research project has an overall aim. Again, this needs to be clearly stated in a direct way. The objectives generally stem from the overall aim and explain how that aim will be met. They are often organised numerically or in bullet point form and are terse statements that are clear and identifiable.
There are four things you need to remember when creating research objectives. These are:
Appropriateness (each objective is clearly related to what you want to study)
Distinctness (each objective is focused and incrementally assists in achieving the overall research aim)
Clarity (each objective avoids ambiguity)
Being achievable (each objective is realistic and can be completed within a reasonable timescale)
In creating research objectives that conform to the above, you may want to consider:
Starting each objective with a key word (e.g. identify, assess, evaluate, explore, examine, investigate, determine, etc.)
Beginning with a simple objective to help set the scene in the study
Finding a good numerical balance – usually two is too few and six is too many. Aim for approximately 3-5 objectives
If you can achieve this balance, you should be well positioned to demonstrate a clear and logical position that exudes competence.
Remember that you must address these research objectives in your research. You cannot simply mention them in your dissertation introduction and then forget about them. Just like any other part of the dissertation, this section must be referenced in the findings and discussion – as well as in the conclusion.
This section has offered the basic sections of a dissertation introduction chapter. There are additional bits and pieces that you may choose to add. The research questions have already been highlighted as one option; an outline of the structure of the entire dissertation may be another example of information you might like to include.
As long as your dissertation introduction is organised and clear, you are well on the way to writing success with this chapter.
The Conclusion
Getting started
Your dissertation conclusion will do one of two things. It may fill you with joy, because it signals that you are almost done. Or it may be a particularly challenging test of your mental strength, because by this point in the dissertation you are likely exhausted.
It is your job at this point to make one last push to the finish to create a cohesive and organised final chapter. If your concluding chapter is unstructured or some sort of ill-disciplined rambling, the person marking your work might be left with the impression that you lacked the appropriate skills for writing or that you lost interest in your own work.
To avoid these pitfalls, you will need to know what is expected of you and what you need to include in your successful dissertation conclusion chapter.
There are three parts (at a minimum) that need to exist within your dissertation conclusion. These include:
Research objectives – a summary of your findings and the resulting conclusions
Recommendations
Contributions to knowledge
You may also wish to consider a section on self-reflection, i.e. how you have grown as a researcher or a section on limitations (though this might have been covered in your research methods chapter). This adds something a little different to your chapter and allows you to demonstrate how this dissertation has affected you as an academic.
Furthermore, just like any other chapter in your dissertation, your conclusion must begin with an introduction (usually very short at about a paragraph in length). This paragraph typically explains the organisation of the content, reminds the reader of your research aims/objectives, and provides a brief statement of what you are about to do.
The length of a dissertation conclusion varies with the length of the overall project, but similar to a dissertation introduction, a 5-7% of the total word count estimate should be acceptable.
Research objectives
The research objectives section only asks you to answer two questions.
These are:
1. As a result of the completion of the literature review, along with the empirical research that you completed, what did you find out in relation to your personal research objectives?
2. What conclusions have you come to?
A common mistake by students when addressing these questions is to again go into the analysis of the data collection and findings. This is not necessary, as the reader has likely just finished reading your discussion chapter and does not need to go through it all again. This section is not about persuading, you are simply informing the reader of the summary of your findings.
Before you begin writing, it may be helpful to list out your research objectives and then brainstorm a couple of bullet points from your data findings/discussion where you really think your research has met the objective. This will allow you to create a mini-outline and avoid the ‘rambling’ pitfall described above.
Recommendations
The purpose of a recommendations section is to offer the reader some advice on what you think should happen next. Failing to include such information can result in the loss of marks. Including these recommendations as implicit suggestions within other parts of the brief (e.g. the analysis/discussion chapters) is a good start, but without having a detailed explanation of them in the conclusion chapter, you might be setting yourself up for failure.
There are two types of recommendations you can make. The first is to make a recommendation that is specific to the evidence of your study, the second is to make recommendations for future research. While certain recommendations will be specific to your data, there are always a few that seem to appear consistently throughout student work. These tend to include things like a larger sample size, different context, increased longitudinal time frame, etc. If you get to this point and feel you need to add words to your dissertation, this is an easy place to do so – just be cautious that making recommendations that have little or no obvious link to the research conclusions are not beneficial.
A good recommendations section will link to previous conclusions, and since this section was ultimately linked to your research aims and objectives, the recommendations section then completes the package.
Contributions to knowledge
The idea of ‘contributions to knowledge’ largely appears in PhD-level work and less so at the Master’s level, depending of course on the nature of the research. Master’s students might want to check with their supervisor before proceeding with this section. Ultimately, in this section, the focus is to demonstrate how your research has enhanced existing knowledge.
Your main contribution to knowledge likely exists within your empirical work (though in a few select cases it might be drawn from the literature review). Implicit in this section is the notion that you are required to make an original contribution to research, and you are, in fact, telling the reader what makes your research study unique. In order to achieve this, you need to explicitly tell the reader what makes your research special.
There are many ways to do this, but perhaps the most common is to identify what other researchers have done and how your work builds upon theirs. It may also be helpful to specify the gap in the research (which you would have identified either in your dissertation introduction or literature review) and how your research has contributed to ‘filling the gap.’
Another obvious way that you can demonstrate that you have made a contribution to knowledge is to highlight the publications that you have contributed to the field (if any). So, for example, if you have published a chapter of your dissertation in a journal or you have given a conference presentation and have conference proceedings, you could highlight these as examples of how you are making this contribution.
In summing up this section, remember that a dissertation conclusion is your last opportunity to tell the reader what you want them to remember. The chapter needs to be comprehensive and must include multiple sub-sections.
Ensure that you refresh the reader’s memory about your research objectives, tell the reader how you have met your research objectives, provide clear recommendations for future researchers and demonstrate that you have made a contribution to knowledge. If there is time and/or space, you might want to consider a limitations or self-reflection section.
The Abstract
An abstract can often come across as an afterthought by students. The entire dissertation is written and now there are only a few hundred words to go. Yet the abstract is going to end up being one of the most influential parts of your dissertation. If done well, it should provide a synopsis of your work and entice the reader to continue on to read the entire dissertation.
A good abstract will contain the following elements:
A statement of the problem or issue that you are investigating – including why research on this topic is needed
The research methods used
The main results/findings
The main conclusions and recommendations
An abstract generally should be only one neat and tidy paragraph that is no more than one page (though it could be much shorter). The abstract usually appears after the title page and the acknowledgements.
Different institutions often have different guidelines for writing the abstract, so it is best to check with your department prior to beginning.
When you are writing the abstract, you must find the balance between too much information and not enough. You want the reader to be able to review the abstract and get a general overall sense of what you have done.
As you write, you may want to keep the following questions in mind:
1. Is the focus of my research identified and clear?
2. Have I presented my rationale behind this study?
3. Is how I conducted my research evident?
4. Have I provided a summary of my main findings/results?
5. Have I included my main conclusions and recommendations?
In some instances, you may also be asked to include a few keywords. Ensure that your keywords are specifically related to your research. You are better off staying away from generic terms like ‘education’ or ‘science’ and instead provide a more specific focus on what you have actually done with terms like ‘e-learning’ or ‘biomechanics’.
Finally, you want to avoid having too many acronyms in your abstract. The abstract needs to appeal to a wide audience, and so making it understandable to this wider audience is absolutely essential to your success.
Ultimately, writing a good abstract is the same as writing a good dissertation; you must present a logical and organised synopsis that demonstrates what your research has achieved. With such a goal in mind, you can now successfully proceed with your abstract!
Many students also choose to make the necessary efforts to ensure that their chapter is ready for submission by applying an edit to their finished work. It is always beneficial to have a fresh set of eyes have a read of your chapter to make sure that you have not omitted any vital points and that it is error free.
How to structure a dissertation
A dissertation or thesis is a long piece of academic writing based on original research, submitted as part of a doctoral, master’s, or bachelor’s degree.
Your dissertation is probably the longest piece of writing you’ve ever done, and it can be intimidating to know where to start. This article helps you work out exactly what you should include and where to include it.
Not all dissertations are structured exactly the same – the form your research takes will depend on your location, discipline, topic and approach.
For example, dissertations in the humanities are often structured more like a long essay, building an overall argument to support a central thesis, with chapters organized around different themes or case studies.
But if you’re doing empirical research in the sciences or social sciences, your dissertation should generally contain all of the following elements. In many cases, each will be a separate chapter, but sometimes you might combine them. For example, in certain kinds of qualitative social science, the results and discussion will be woven together rather than separated.
The order of sections can also vary between fields and countries. For example, some universities advise that the conclusion should always come before the discussion.
If in doubt about how your thesis or dissertation should be structured, always check your department’s guidelines and consult with your supervisor.
Title page
The very first page of your document contains your dissertation’s title, your name, department, institution, degree program, and submission date. Sometimes it also includes your student number, your supervisor’s name, and the university’s logo. Many programs have strict requirements for formatting the dissertation title page.
Acknowledgements
The acknowledgements section is usually optional, and gives space for you to thank everyone who helped you in writing your dissertation. This might include your supervisors, participants in your research, and friends or family who supported you.
Abstract
The abstract is a short summary of your dissertation, usually about 150-300 words long. You should write it at the very end, when you’ve completed the rest of the dissertation. In the abstract, make sure to:
- State the main topic and aims of your research
- Describe the methods you used
- Summarize the main results
- State your conclusions
Although the abstract is very short, it’s the first part (and sometimes the only part) of your dissertation that people will read, so it’s important that you get it right. If you’re struggling to write a strong abstract, read our guide on how to write an abstract.
Table of Contents
In the table of contents, list all of your chapters and subheadings and their page numbers. The dissertation contents page gives the reader an overview of your structure and helps easily navigate the document.
All parts of your dissertation should be included in the table of contents, including the appendices. You can generate a table of contents automatically in Word if you used heading styles.
List of Figures and Tables
If you have used a lot of tables and figures in your dissertation, you should itemize them in a numbered list. You can automatically generate this list using the Insert Caption feature in Word.
List of Abbreviations
If you have used a lot of abbreviations in your dissertation, you can include them in an alphabetized list of abbreviations so that the reader can easily look up their meanings.
Glossary
If you have used a lot of highly specialized terms that will not be familiar to your reader, it might be a good idea to include a glossary. List the terms alphabetically and explain each term with a brief description or definition.
Introduction
In the introduction, you set up your dissertation’s topic, purpose, and relevance, and tell the reader what to expect in the rest of the dissertation. The introduction should:
- Establish your research topic, giving necessary background information to contextualize your work
- Narrow down the focus and define the scope of the research
- Discuss the state of existing research on the topic, showing your work’s relevance to a broader problem or debate
- Clearly state your research questions and objectives
- Give an overview of your dissertation’s structure
Everything in the introduction should be clear, engaging, and relevant to your research. By the end, the reader should understand the what, why and how of your research. If you need more help, read our guide on how to write a dissertation introduction.
Literature review / Theoretical framework
Before you start on your research, you should have conducted a literature review to gain a thorough understanding of the academic work that already exists on your topic. This means:
- Collecting sources (e.g. books and journal articles) and selecting the most relevant ones
- Critically evaluating and analyzing each source
- Drawing connections between them (e.g. themes, patterns, conflicts, gaps) to make an overall point
In the dissertation literature review chapter or section, you shouldn’t just summarize existing studies, but develop a coherent structure and argument that leads to a clear basis or justification for your own research. For example, it might aim to show how your research:
- Addresses a gap in the literature
- Takes a new theoretical or methodological approach to the topic
- Proposes a solution to an unresolved problem
- Advances a theoretical debate
- Builds on and strengthens existing knowledge with new data
The literature review often becomes the basis for a theoretical framework, in which you define and analyze the key theories, concepts and models that frame your research. In this section you can answer descriptive research questions about the relationship between concepts or variables.
Methodology
The methodology chapter or section describes how you conducted your research, allowing your reader to assess its validity. You should generally include:
- The overall approach and type of research (e.g. qualitative, quantitative, experimental, ethnographic)
- Your methods of collecting data (e.g. interviews, surveys, archives)
- Details of where, when, and with whom the research took place
- Your methods of analyzing data (e.g. statistical analysis, discourse analysis)
- Tools and materials you used (e.g. computer programs, lab equipment)
- A discussion of any obstacles you faced in conducting the research and how you overcame them
- An evaluation or justification of your methods
Your aim in the methodology is to accurately report what you did, as well as convincing the reader that this was the best approach to answering your research questions or objectives.
Results
Next, you report the results of your research. You can structure this section around sub-questions, hypotheses, or topics. Only report results that are relevant to your objectives and research questions. In some disciplines, the results section is strictly separated from the discussion, while in others the two are combined.
For example, for qualitative methods like in-depth interviews, the presentation of the data will often be woven together with discussion and analysis, while in quantitative and experimental research, the results should be presented separately before you discuss their meaning. If you’re unsure, consult with your supervisor and look at sample dissertations to find out the best structure for your research.
In the results section it can often be helpful to include tables, graphs and charts. Think carefully about how best to present your data, and don’t include tables or figures that just repeat what you have written – they should provide extra information or usefully visualize the results in a way that adds value to your text.
Full versions of your data (such as interview transcripts) can be included as an appendix.
Discussion
The discussion is where you explore the meaning and implications of your results in relation to your research questions. Here you should interpret the results in detail, discussing whether they met your expectations and how well they fit with the framework that you built in earlier chapters. If any of the results were unexpected, offer explanations for why this might be. It’s a good idea to consider alternative interpretations of your data and discuss any limitations that might have influenced the results.
The discussion should reference other scholarly work to show how your results fit with existing knowledge. You can also make recommendations for future research or practical action.
Conclusion
The dissertation conclusion should concisely answer the main research question, leaving the reader with a clear understanding of your central argument.
In some academic conventions, the conclusion refers to a short section that comes before the discussion: first you directly state your overall conclusions, then you discuss and interpret their meaning.
In other contexts, however, the conclusion refers to the final chapter, where you wrap up your dissertation with a final reflection on what you did and how you did it. This type of conclusion often also includes recommendations for research or practice.
In this section, it’s important to show how your findings contribute to knowledge in the field and why your research matters. What have you added to what was already known?
Reference list
You must include full details of all sources that you have cited in a reference list (sometimes also called a works cited list or bibliography). It’s important to follow a consistent citation style. Each style has strict and specific requirements for how to format your sources in the reference list.
Common styles include APA and MLA, but your program will often specify which citation style you should use – make sure to check the requirements, and ask your supervisor if you’re unsure.
To save time creating the reference list and make sure your citations are correctly and consistently formatted, you can use the Scribbr Citation Generator.
Appendices
Your dissertation itself should contain only essential information that directly contributes to answering your research question. Documents you have used that do not fit into the main body of your dissertation (such as interview transcripts, survey questions or tables with full figures) can be added as appendices.
Editing and proofreading
Making sure all the sections are in the right place is only the first step to a well-written dissertation. Leave plenty of time for editing and proofreading. Grammar mistakes and sloppy formatting errors can drag down the quality of your hard work.
You should plan to write and revise several drafts of your thesis or dissertation before focusing on language mistakes, typos and inconsistencies.
Learn How to Write a Dissertation in a Week and Do an Outstanding Job at It
August 8, 2017
Writing your dissertation is one of the biggest challenges you will have to face in your entire academic career. Most students have months to complete this complex writing project, and still manage to get into various problems. Many students don’t even finish on time, and this is costing them a lot. But what if you have only one week to complete your thesis? Is it possible to finish the paper on time?
Life is full of unpredictable events, so unexpected things happen; things that can prevent your from working on your dissertation. If you have just one week left until you need to turn in the paper, we have good news. Doing a dissertation in a week is possible. However, be prepared to put in a lot of time and effort. You will have to work hard to pull it off. If you are willing to dedicate the time and effort, here is what you need to do – starting right now.
Organize Your Time
Staying organized is very important at this point. Make a schedule that you can keep. Dedicate one or two days to intensive research and make sure you collect all the data in this time.
The next three or four days should be reserved for the writing part. If you are under time constraints, you don’t want to write a 20,000 word dissertation. If you manage to write 3,000 words per day, you can write around 12,000 words in just four days. As you can see, writing a dissertation in a week is definitely possible.
The last one or two days should be reserved for editing and proofreading. You should have more than enough time for these two tasks in 24 to 48 hours.
Divide the Paper Into Manageable Parts
By dividing a lengthy dissertation into several smaller parts, you can work on more manageable chunks every day. Also, creating an outline helps you remain focused on the most important parts of your thesis. You need to write dissertation in a week and have around four days to finish the writing part. This means that dividing the paper into four parts of around 3,000 words each is your best option. Just make sure you complete at least one part every day.
Write the Introduction and Conclusion Last
Don’t lose time struggling with the introduction and conclusion. These are the two most difficult parts of writing a dissertation. It is a lot easier to write them after you write the body of the paper because you already know everything about the topic and about what it written in the thesis. This is why professional writers always write their intro and conclusion last.
Get Help From Professionals
Remember that you are not alone when it comes to writing dissertations. Writing such a complex paper in a week is a gargantuan task so you need all the help you can get. This is why you are advised to get some help from a professional academic writing company. You can buy dissertation online or get at least some help with the most difficult parts of it. In any case, finishing a dissertation in one week is absolutely doable if you are willing to work hard and also get a bit of help from an academic writer.
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Varonika Rubia, Librarian in New York
Let us begin by deconstructing a dissertation. What are the main parts of a dissertation? What to include and what not to include?
A dissertation as we mentioned before is a formal piece of writing of considerable length which consists of the following parts:
1. Abstract
An abstract is a short summary of the entire dissertation. It consists of the research question along with chapter outlines and the conclusion. This is the first thing that a person is going to read in your dissertation so write it well.
2. Research question
The next important component is the research question. It is the fundam...
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Stephen Jimenez, Ph.D. Civil Engineering, Vanderbilt University (2017)
Originally Answered: What are the sections of a dissertation?