Authoring a PhD

Lead-in materials 
(2 chapters at most)
Lead-out materials 
(1 or 2 chapters)
Core
(5/8ths of words,
and 5 chapters)
Figure 3.1
Interrelating the whole and the core

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than half of your text should be original-ish stuff, reporting 
primary research that you have undertaken, or making new and
distinctive arguments that you can plausibly claim to have orig-
inated or developed. This is a very demanding standard, but a
therapeutic one. It throws into sharp focus the need to concen-
trate on your thesis’s value-added elements. If you are doing a
papers model dissertation then although your overall word
length will be less, the ratio of core materials will be a good deal
higher. Each of the four or five ‘papers’ chapters you need to
write will have to be around 75 per cent original material to
count as publishable, an even more demanding standard.
Do not end-load a ‘big book’ thesis, leaving all the good bits
squeezed into the last third or quarter of the text, as many peo-
ple do. A recurring problem in most humanities and social sci-
ences disciplines is that students spend so much time and effort
on writing lead-in materials that they create a long, dull, low-
value sequence of chapters before readers come across anything
original. To check your own plan, count the number of chap-
ters and the number of pages that readers must scan through
before they come to the core. Overextending the lead-in stuff
will also squeeze out the time needed to do your core research
and write it up properly. Long ‘legacy’ chapters (often literature
reviews or methods descriptions inherited from your first one
or two years of study) also restrict the text space you have avail-
able to set out the core properly.
Avoiding an end-loaded thesis is more difficult than it looks.
When beginning students are doing text planning they often
multiply introductory literature reviews, or insert unneeded
theoretical or ground-clearing or methodological chapters. It is
easy to become convinced that you must somehow discuss and
explain everything about your project before actually doing it.
To curb this tendency, try setting a maximum size limit for lead-
in materials of two chapters. Obviously every ‘big book’ thesis
needs at least one lead-in and one lead-out chapter, usually 
the first and last respectively. With only eight chapters overall,
and a minimum size for the core of five chapters, that leaves
you only one spare chapter that can hold additional lead-in
materials – such as descriptive set-up materials or an account of
your methods. Less commonly the ‘spare’ chapter might pro-
vide a second lead-out chapter, for instance where your research
P L A N N I N G A N I N T E G R A T E D T H E S I S
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5 1

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findings are very rich and require a lot of after-analysis. Note
that if you schedule three chapters of lead-in material then you
must either erode your core to half or less of your thesis (which
is dangerous in meeting the doctoral level); or leave yourself 
no space for a proper lead-out chapter; or begin inflating the
number of your chapters beyond what is ideal. Bear in mind 
the adverse impacts on professional readers of having to page
through three whole chapters of secondary guff before they
reach any worthwhile value-added elements. If you find that
your initial thesis plan has four or more chapters of lead-in
material, my advice would be scrap this schema at once and to
rethink your approach from scratch.
Clearly identifying what is core in your thesis and what is not
can be a psychologically taxing decision. You may tend to dis-
guise from yourself that some chapters are not actually part of
the core. Or you may enlarge your core inauthentically so as to
include low value-added materials and get yourself up to hav-
ing four or five apparently qualifying chapters. You need to
guard against these tendencies, because being honest with
yourself can be crucial for your research planning. For instance,
what happens if you can only identify three chapters out of
eight in your thesis plan that genuinely seem to be value-added
material? You need to go back to the fundamental design of
your project here, and see how you can produce one or two
more core chapters. For instance, if you previously planned to
undertake two case study or detailed analysis chapters, can you
instead aim to undertake three or four case studies? Or if you
previously were using just one method for generating results,
should you think about employing another confirmatory
method as well?
Being honest about your core is also vital to organizing your
thesis effectively. Once you have the core firmly in focus you
need to cue it and brand it heavily for readers. Your thesis title,
your abstract, your chapter headings and the contents page, your
preface and the introductory chapter – all these key organizers
need to be mobilized so as to highlight, set up and frame the core
materials in your thesis. The ‘need to know’ criterion should
apply strongly here too. Ask of your lead-in chapter(s): ‘What do
readers