How long should my dissertation (chapter) be?

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 for this! A mathematics PhD will generally be a lot smaller than a longitudinal multi-methods qualitative social science paper. And even within disciplines, length is never as important as quality. However, I find that, for a lot of my students and clients, having these estimates helps them stick to a plan, give boundaries to their work, and just generally get on with it.

So that is what this post is about: giving you flawed, but hopefully useful estimates so that you don't feel obligated to write forever.

Let's start with just comparing dissertation wordcounts as a whole, then break them down by chapter.

What are typical word counts for the dissertation?

This varies dramatically by level of study, field, and department. They also depend on whether your overall mark is dependent on coursework as well. So think of these as very cheeky estimates.

For a four-year undergraduate dissertation, or an 'Honours' dissertation, suggested lengths are often very short: often no more than a publication (6-10 thousand words) and sometimes as short as 8-12 pages (which is even less). Master's dissertations that form only part of the master's degree are a little larger, with some ranging from 10-12 thousand words, and others up to 20 thousand words. No surprises then that doctorates and dissertation-only Master's are larger still, often ranging from 25 to 40 thousand words.

And PhDs take the cake, with many departments (not all) capping word counts at 80 thousand words so that you don't end up writing 400 pages of meaningless drivel, but generally end up coming in over 50 thousand words.

And no, typically abstracts, references and appendices do not count towards these estimates.

But what about my [insert most terrifying] chapter length?

You may have some vague idea about your institution's dissertation expectations as a whole, but it is the chapter breakdown that probably brought you to this post.

The big thing to be aware of is this: the literature review and results chapters are often the largest chapters by far. They may be roughly the same size, but this depends on the nature of your results. For instance, rich, detailed qualitative findings will often need more space and often rely on less detailed theory. This means a larger results section and a smaller literature review section. On the other hand, quantitative, deductive research requires a more detailed explanation of expectations, hypotheses and frameworks (i.e., a chunkier literature review), but a model is a model and a test is a test, and often there is not much more to writing up than relatively generic statements. Yes, you can always add a bit more, but no one wants you to read in text all the numbers that are already present in the A4 table: just the crucial trends.

Similarly, massive introduction and conclusion chapters (if, indeed, you even have a separate conclusion) are an absolute bore and ideally will not be more than 10% of the wordcount. In the USA, introductions are often chunkier than in the UK, but even those have limits.

The only chapters I find a bit more variable in terms of proportion are the methodology and discussion. A generic, run-of-the-mill methodology chapter where you are using standard techniques probably doesn't need to be more than 10-15% of the paper. But this balloons if you are doing something more novel or combining multiple methods and samples.

Similarly, the discussion can just get to the point. But some people struggle with letting it go.

Is this word count what you aim for in your first draft?

Absolutely not. Your first draft is a mess. Your supervisor will tell you to add more, you will read more, and you will realise you need to go back to your literature review and add more to make your discussion make sense. Even just meeting your 50% wordcount targets may be enough. I usually encourage 75-80%.

Tl;dr

PhDs are long. Literature reviews and results are long. Introductions, methodologies and discussions are short. Your first draft can be shorter.

The end.

PS: if you want a more extended template, alongside word count and section advice and insight, check out my templates here.