PhD thesis structure, chapter by chapter

The overall structure of a PhD thesis

Every thesis has three parts, the front matter, the chapters and the end matter.

Most universities fix the exact order of the front-matter pages and wording, many times with specimen pages. The rules of particular universities are in our guides to Anna University, VTU, JNTU and Bharathiar University theses. The acknowledgement is the one front-matter page you can write in your own way, and we have a separate guide on how to write the thesis acknowledgement. From here on we talk only about the chapters.

Epigraphs and dedications

Sometimes two optional pages come in the preliminary pages. One is the dedication. It is one or two lines on a separate page, like “To my parents”, or to the memory of some person. Mostly it comes after the title page, before the acknowledgements. Epigraph means a short quotation kept at the start to set the tone of the work, and the author’s name and source go below it. You can put it on its own page just before Chapter 1, or a shorter one can open each chapter.

Both pages are optional, and universities differ on whether they are allowed at all. Bharathidasan University has kept an optional dedication page just after the title sheet in its thesis guidelines. The University of Mumbai’s PhD regulations take the opposite view and do not allow a dedication note at all. The clause is given in our Mumbai thesis format guide. On epigraphs most ordinances are quiet. In case your ordinance does not mention either page, ask the research section first before putting it in. Then follow the page order shown in your university’s specimen.

Both pages should be short only. For a dedication one line is enough, for an epigraph two or three lines. Choose an epigraph you can explain if an examiner asks why you picked it. Write the author and source of the quotation correctly. Pick a line from your own subject, as a famous quote that could open any thesis adds little. These pages are numbered along with the other preliminary pages, in roman numerals if your format uses them.

How long is a PhD thesis?

India has no national rule on this. Most PhD theses in the social sciences and management come to about 200 to 300 pages. Science and engineering theses are many times 150 to 250 pages. Some universities do put an upper limit, like Bharathiar University, which limits the main text to 275 pages. Examiners look at the quality of the argument. A thick thesis full of padding does not get any extra credit from them.

The standard PhD thesis chapters

Many theses change this pattern a little, and that is quite fine.

• Engineering and computer science theses many times have one chapter for each technique or system the scholar built. Every such chapter has its own design, implementation and evaluation, and after them comes a comparison chapter.
• Laboratory sciences mostly use a “materials and methods” chapter, followed by results and discussion chapters for each study.
• Thesis by publication is permitted in a few Indian institutions. In this model the published papers become the core chapters, and an introduction and a conclusion join them together. Still, most Indian universities want the conventional monograph only, so ask your own university before you go ahead with this plan.
• Humanities theses usually build the argument through thematic chapters, and the method is discussed in the introduction itself.

Go to Shodhganga and open five or six recent theses from your own department. They show what your department expects better than any general guide, this one also.

What goes in each chapter

Chapter 1: Introduction

The introduction sets up everything that comes later. (For how it is different from the introduction of a paper, see how to write an introduction.) The usual order goes like this. Begin with the background to the problem and the problem statement. Next write the significance of the study, and then the objectives and research questions, with hypotheses if your study has them. After that you write the scope and delimitations, then definitions of the key terms and a chapter plan. Many Indian theses also give a short profile of the study area or industry here, and some give it separate chapter. Keep the detailed literature for Chapter 2, not in the introduction itself.

Write this chapter at the end, or at least revise it at the end. The objectives you wrote in the first year will have changed by then, and the introduction has to describe the thesis you really wrote.

Chapter 2: Review of literature

In the review you show the examiner that you know the field. It evaluates the work done so far, and it should end at your research gap. Arrange it theme-wise and not author-wise or year-wise. Searching, synthesis and structure are covered in our guide on how to write a literature review.

Chapter 3: Research methodology

This chapter describes the research design, the population and sample, the data sources and instruments, the procedure and the methods of analysis. You also explain how you handled validity, reliability and ethics. For every choice you have to give the reason. Most of the viva questions come from this chapter only. Full details are there in our guide to writing the methodology chapter.

Results or analysis chapters

Results chapters are the main body of the thesis. The cleanest way is one chapter for each objective, or for each group of related objectives. Then the examiner sees exactly where each objective is answered. Arrange the findings in some logical order. One table or figure should make one point only. Name every test you ran and what it showed. If your work is quantitative, examiners will want the effect sizes also along with the p-values.

One weakness is common in Indian theses. There is a long series of tables, each followed by one sentence repeating the numbers in words. Please avoid this. After each table, write what it shows for that objective.

Discussion

Some theses keep a separate discussion chapter. Others discuss the findings at the end of every results chapter, and both ways are acceptable. In either case you must compare your findings with the studies in your review. Show where they agree and where they differ. Then discuss about what your results mean for theory and for practice. A thesis with no real discussion is one of the complaints examiners write most often in their reports.

Final chapter: summary, findings, conclusions and suggestions

Give the main findings one objective at a time, and then state your conclusions. Explain the contribution the thesis makes and mention the limitations clearly. After that, suggest where further research can go. Management and social science theses are expected to have practical suggestions or policy recommendations, and these should come out of your findings only. If a recommendation could be written without doing the study, the examiner will not be impressed. There are worked examples in our conclusion guide.

How to connect the chapters of a thesis

Examiners look for one line of argument running through the thesis. Examiners many times complain that the thesis reads like separate reports bound together, and they count this as a structural fault. Some small habits will prevent this.

• Use the objectives as the spine. The objectives are stated in Chapter 1 and they frame the methodology. The results chapters are organised around them, and in the final chapter you answer them one by one.
• Write chapter openings and closings. In the first paragraph of every chapter, say what it covers and how it follows from the previous one. At the end give a short summary.
• Use the same terms throughout. Define a key construct once. After that use exactly the same words for it in every chapter.
• Cross-refer. Small lines such as “As discussed in Section 2.4” help a lot, because the examiner sees that you know how the parts connect.

The abstract

The thesis abstract gives the whole study in one to two pages, depending on the university. The examiner reads it before anything else, and Shodhganga indexes it also. So spend proper time on it. Our guide on how to write an abstract goes into more detail.

The order to write a thesis in, and a final structural check

Very few scholars write a thesis from page one to the end. Most can follow an order like this.

1. Draft the literature review and methodology early. Both grow out of your synopsis and the work of your first two years.
2. Write up each results chapter in the same week its analysis gets over, as after some months you forget the details.
3. Once all the results are in, write the discussion and the final chapter.
4. Go back to the literature review. Add the recent studies and point it more sharply at the gap you actually filled.
5. Leave the introduction and abstract for the end.
6. Put together the front and end matter, check the formatting, and run the similarity check.

If you have published papers from the thesis, you can reuse your own findings. But most universities expect the text to be rewritten for the thesis and not pasted from the papers. The papers also have to be listed and acknowledged. Your university’s rules decide how much published work can go in.

Before giving the thesis to your guide for the final reading, go through its structure with this list.

• Each objective from Chapter 1 has a place in the results chapters where it gets answered, and the final chapter answers every one of them by name.
• Wherever the research questions or objectives appear, the wording is exactly the same.
• Chapter 2 ends at the gap, and Chapter 3 starts by showing how your design addresses that gap.
• Every chapter starts with a short paragraph on what it covers and ends with a short link to the next chapter.
• The thesis title is the same as the title approved at registration or in the pre-submission synopsis.
• Tables and figures are numbered chapter-wise (Table 4.3), and each of them is referred to somewhere in the text.
• The reference list has every source you cited, and no source that you did not cite.

In the viva also, examiners test the same structure, and our guide to common PhD viva questions shows how they do it. A specialist from our thesis chapter review team can read the draft chapters and comment on structure and argument. The research and the writing remain yours.