On R is My Pal, in an effort to procrastinate by himself dissertation, beckmw required a glance at dissertation length through the digital archives in the College of Minnesota.

I’ve selected the very best fifty majors using the greatest quantity of dissertations and produced boxplots to exhibit relative distributions. Very few variations are observed one of the majors, even though some exceptions are apparent. Financial aspects, mathematics, and biostatistics had the cheapest median page lengths, whereas anthropology, history, and political science had the greatest median page lengths. This distinction is sensible because of the nature from the disciplines.

I had been around the lengthy finish from the statistics distribution, around 180 pages. Most likely since i had lots of pictures.

When I ran my dissertation, people frequently requested me the number of pages I’d written and the number of pages I’d left to create. Irrrve never were built with a good answer, since there’s no page limit or needed page count. It’s just if you (as well as your advisor) seem like there’s enough to obtain a way. Sometimes that can take 50 pages. Other occasions it requires 200.

So for individuals who have that dreaded page-count question, you are able to wave your finger only at that chart and tell people you’re somewhere within the distribution.

Yes, the colours are useless. They convey no information that isn’t already transparently communicated.

For instance, this area plot is completely obsolete. Read Edward Tufte’s books, particularly chapter 6 of &#8220The Visual Display of Quantitative Information&#8221 for that description from the successor towards the box plot.

When it comes to subject from the publish, my math dissertation was 88 pages. My consultant’s was (not really a typo) 23 pages, double-spaced, including front matter and references.

And Presburger’s was 19 pages approximately. But his supervisor, Tarski, wouldn’t provide him his PhD. He thought the thesis was way too short. So there’s a lesser bound.

So using the current trend of dissertation chapters being prepared/formatted as manuscript submissions for journals in advance (that have limits towards the manuscript length), I’d anticipate seeing overall dissertation lengths get shorter with time (to provide). Mine began out considerably longer, but because I began conforming to focus on journal format standards, The overall length was reduced with a third approximately. Is that this true outdoors of ecosystem too?

Oh, dear, my dissertation wouldn’t even show up on this chart, but could be from the right edge. You will find, I’m within the ‘runs lengthy’ disciplines. On the other hand, my opus would count as short for, say, a German Habilitation or perhaps a French These d’Etat within my field, so the treatment depends!

This is extremely interesting. One variable that isn’t taken into account, but varies between institutions and individual authors, is the amount of words per page &#8211 based on spacing, margins, font size, and so forth. A far more useful plot would count theses by words, rather of pages, like a way of measuring content.