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Post by confession on Jan 23, 2014 9:51:13 GMT -5
I confess. I am a quantitative sociologist. My dissertation was about 100 pages single-spaced, 41k words.
I am a little embarrassed it's so short!
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Post by Shorter... on Jan 23, 2014 10:08:03 GMT -5
Same here...76 single-spaced pages, 29k words. Not embarrassed at all...defended, accepted and published as three papers. Better to be short and see the light of day, than too long and in need of major revisions before being published.
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Post by Nice! on Jan 23, 2014 10:59:16 GMT -5
Same here...76 single-spaced pages, 29k words. Not embarrassed at all...defended, accepted and published as three papers. Better to be short and see the light of day, than too long and in need of major revisions before being published. Nice! Where'd you publish?
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Post by ha on Jan 23, 2014 11:01:38 GMT -5
mines looking like it'll be 100 double spaced pages...is that too short? its 3 papers, 2 published so far...
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Post by Jobs??? on Jan 23, 2014 11:24:51 GMT -5
Yeah but do any of you have JOBS?
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Post by Shorter... on Jan 23, 2014 11:27:48 GMT -5
JOBS??? Yes...Assistant Prof...with a start up research package and administrative support.
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Post by Sure, why not? on Jan 23, 2014 11:34:53 GMT -5
Why on earth would a short dissertation suggest folks might not have jobs? My dissertation was only 170 pages, double spaced. And I'm an ethnographer. I planned to get 3 papers out of it, and 2 have been placed so far. Seems to me a more pragmatic and efficient approach to the dissertation benchmark. The point is turning around good publications, and I have doubts that gargantuan dissertations make that easier.
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Post by whyjob on Jan 23, 2014 11:56:24 GMT -5
Why would length of dissertation have any bearing on getting a job? How would a search committee even know how long your dissertation is? Most applicants don't have it finished at the time of the interview, so length isn't established. But, even if they're applying with Ph.D. in-hand, how many schools ask for your entire dissertation?
The only reason to make a dissertation longer would be because your committee demands it. As long as you can get publications out of it, no employer is ever going to care how long it is. They just care that it's done.
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Post by i did on Jan 23, 2014 12:26:23 GMT -5
I got a TT job at in a top 40 department. My dissertation was 12 pages, including references, tables, figures, appendices, and an acknowledgements page (in which I acknowledged how short the dissertation was). I've published six papers from it so far, and am in the process of submitting a seventh.
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Post by bullshit on Jan 23, 2014 14:54:26 GMT -5
I got a TT job at in a top 40 department. My dissertation was 12 pages, including references, tables, figures, appendices, and an acknowledgements page (in which I acknowledged how short the dissertation was). I've published six papers from it so far, and am in the process of submitting a seventh. This is ridiculous. I don't believe it unless it was an entirely methodological dissertation. Out yourself.
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Post by joke on Jan 23, 2014 15:16:14 GMT -5
pretty sure 'i did' was joking....
lets not take ourselves too seriously
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Post by quant diss on Jan 23, 2014 15:29:38 GMT -5
In my department (heavily quantitative), it is pretty common to see dissertations that are less than 100 pages. I've even seen a 60 page dissertation (with a lot of tables). I wouldn't worry about length. If it takes 60 pages to prove the point, why make it longer?
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Post by My case. on Jan 23, 2014 21:37:27 GMT -5
Another quant person here, albeit one who does fairly long, theory-driven papers relative to the rest of my subfield. I'm expecting my dissertation to be about 30,000-35,000 words. Maybe a bit longer if I decide to tack on an essay about how I think it all fits together and what the upshot is of what I've found. If I do decide to do that, it'll be for my own sense of satisfaction.
As it stands, the plan is four papers, two long (by the standards of my subfield), one medium-length and one very short. Two are already published/accepted, and two (one long, one short) have yet to be fully drafted. In terms of coherence, I think of them as two pairs of closely related papers, where the pairs share a broad topic but are concerned with different aspects of the topic. I expect them all to be moderately- to very well-placed.
I am hoping to submit, as my dissertation, basically the two published papers stapled to submittable (or maybe submitted by then) drafts of the other two, but will defer to my committee if they want me to make a bigger effort to follow conventional dissertation formatting (e.g., replacing "In this article" with "In this chapter", etc). In other words, who cares what your dissertation looks like?
Not only does this vary by subfield, but also by whether the diss is the student's only/major piece of work, or just one project among many. If the student has a lot of other publications, I think it matters a lot less how ambitious the dissertation is. And, of course, length is not a perfect proxy for ambition. Let me tell you, I labored long and hard to make the published long paper from my diss as short as it was. Weeks of successive reimagining made it a lot shorter than it started out as being.
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Post by runner on Jan 24, 2014 7:49:01 GMT -5
Old saying...
If I'd had more time, I'd've written less.
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Post by qualconfession on Jan 29, 2014 10:45:06 GMT -5
Qualitative scholar here. My dissertation was 135 pages. I was in a 3 year program (came in with a master's), funding was running out and I had a job offer so it was time to wrap things up. Would have like another year for writing but that didn't work out. In the end the length matters much less than the content. Or at least that's what I'm telling myself. You can make up your own mind.
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