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Ah... yes... word counts. You may be lucky enough to belong to a department or institution that gives you specifics: breaks down your dissertation by chapter and word count or page number. If so, count yourself lucky. Many students around the world doing "Dissertation only" Master's or PhDs (where there is no coursework associated with the degree) are often given vague estimates (larger than X or less than Y) for the entire dissertation. Now, there are a lot of good reasons f

So, you are writing your literature review or an assignment for uni on a very popular topic. Obviously, academic literature, ideally peer-reviewed and published in a respected journal, is king, but what happens if there is just nothing out there? You know there should be. I mean, everyone’s talking about it. This is a problem faced by many students researching topical issues, especially those surrounding current events or emerging technologies. Similarly, if you are someone

Not all evidence is created equal. At least that is the premise of the hierarchy of scientific evidence: a simplified tool used to understand how different types of articles and reports compare in terms of the strength of evidence provided. It is a tool created for the medical field, and, while many variations exist, they boil down to the same idea: some pieces of evidence, articles, and methodological approaches are of better quality (particularly for clinical application) t

So you are expected to write a gazillion sections for your methods chapter. You are told you need a research philosophy or paradigm (what?), an approach, and a research design. Only THEN do you get into the nitty-gritty of what you actually do (your sampling, data collection, and analysis methods). And you don't only need them... you need to justify them too! AND they need to be aligned with your research questions and aims. The worst... The good news is that a lot of these t