Comments on: How long is a thesis?

Question: How long is a thesis?

handee — Wed, 25 May 2005 05:39:57 -0800

Mefi Doctors: A recent Ask Metafilter question prompts me to ask - how long was your thesis?

What subject did you do it in? Is there any difference in thesis length between countries?

By: MrMoonPie

MrMoonPie — Wed, 25 May 2005 05:48:06 -0800

250 pages, on Don Quixote in 18th-Century English lit. My then-wife's was about 50 pages, I think, in Math.

By: Prospero

Prospero — Wed, 25 May 2005 06:01:05 -0800

180 pages, on James Joyce, William Gaddis, and Thomas Pynchon. Mine was on the short end for an English Lit. Ph.D. thesis, though.

By: thomas j wise

thomas j wise — Wed, 25 May 2005 06:03:33 -0800

375 pages (2 vols.) on the writing of women's history in Britain from 1770-1870. And then it became a book, and came in at 220 pages. Ah, dissertationese.

By: shoos

shoos — Wed, 25 May 2005 06:08:15 -0800

If by doctor you mean PhD, then 120. My advisor's was around 350, btw.

By: picklebird

picklebird — Wed, 25 May 2005 06:14:01 -0800

378 angst-ridden and teeth-pulling pages. A PhD in sociology.

By: ROU_Xenophobe

ROU_Xenophobe — Wed, 25 May 2005 06:14:36 -0800

Around 200 pages, on choice of rules in legislatures. Not especially long or short for poli-sci, though I guess closer to short than long.

Later it became a few articles, with the relevant sections shedding weight dramatically. Not really suprising -- in a dissertation, you don't have any good reason not to cover your ass and mention everything and everyone that's maybe-relevant.

By: gaspode

gaspode — Wed, 25 May 2005 06:15:06 -0800

A PhD in neuroendocrinology took me 110 pages, but that was including refs.

By: Johnny Assay

Johnny Assay — Wed, 25 May 2005 06:15:22 -0800

My impression is that dissertations in the natural sciences are usually significantly shorter than those in the humanities and social sciences. A friend of mine in Physics just graduated with a 40-page thesis (although that's below average, even for theoretical physics.)

FWIW, my undergraduate thesis was about 80 pages long.

By: gaspode

gaspode — Wed, 25 May 2005 06:15:45 -0800

Oh I forgot to add that my best friend's thesis, in theoretical physics, was 4 pages.

By: picklebird

picklebird — Wed, 25 May 2005 06:16:28 -0800

Also, don't forget that published theses also have very wide margins (mine are 1.25") and that margins, font, etc. may vary by university and discipline.

By: gleuschk

gleuschk — Wed, 25 May 2005 06:18:53 -0800

72 pages, mathematics. I'm longwinded for my discipline.

By: googly

googly — Wed, 25 May 2005 06:20:37 -0800

350 pages, including acknowledgements, bibliography, and unnecessarily verbose footnotes. On the history of emerging diseases and biological terrorism.

By: srboisvert

srboisvert — Wed, 25 May 2005 06:21:46 -0800

I did a 50 page Cog. Psych. MA Thesis [including everything]. It's roughly between 1/3 and 1/2 of the normal size. It looks pretty skinny next to my wife's 250 page monster.

By: rpn

rpn — Wed, 25 May 2005 06:29:57 -0800

Just finished my PhD in computer science (well, the diploma says media technology) in Sweden: 171 pages (a 30-35 page introduction and 7 papers: 6 published, one unpublished. It's available on my home page.)

By: MrMoonPie

MrMoonPie — Wed, 25 May 2005 06:34:55 -0800

My MA thesis was only 49 pages, by the way, which was on the short side, but it was pretty dense. Plus, it was on Richardson's Clarissa, so I think my thesis advisors gave me credit for simply making it through that hellish book.

By: biffa

biffa — Wed, 25 May 2005 06:37:42 -0800

PhD thesis: 400 pages; 115,000 words, had to get permission to go over 100,000 words, which is actually a pretty high limit by UK university standards anyway. Topic was technology policy, specifically relating to renewable energy. Examiners said I could have done it in half the length, though they didn't say which half I could have lost and all of their (happily few) recommendations for change favoured adding not subtracting stuff.
(Even my M.Sc. thesis was 45,000 words. Basically I'm verbose.)

By: bonehead

bonehead — Wed, 25 May 2005 06:38:56 -0800

About 250 pages in physical/theoretical chemistry. It was the content of five papers with a few additional chapters of introduction, lit and theory review and methods. Most advisors at my school pushed for approximately the same amount of work, so that was pretty par for the course.

By: mbd1mbd1

mbd1mbd1 — Wed, 25 May 2005 06:44:02 -0800

MS in Biomedical Engineering: 127 pages, which includes 30 pages of appendices (mostly color photos).

By: chrisgrau

chrisgrau — Wed, 25 May 2005 06:52:29 -0800

185 pages, philosophy. Dissertations in philosophy can range in length from as short as 70 pages to as long as 450, often depending on how technical or historical they are in nature, with the technical ones (e.g. a thesis in philosophy of physics) generally being pretty short and the historical ones (e.g. a dissertation on Leibniz and his contemporaries) generally being pretty long.

By: TimothyMason

TimothyMason — Wed, 25 May 2005 06:53:13 -0800

350 about - on Dickens, Chadwick and Landseer. In France, many in literary subject areas will go over 500 pages, and the old Thèse d'Etat used to weigh in at about 750 to 800. Scientists write much shorter theses over here too.

By: NewGear

NewGear — Wed, 25 May 2005 07:23:24 -0800

My thesis for my M.A. in Popular Culture was 88 pages, and was titled "'I'm Gonna Kick Yer Butt': Competitive Dramatics and the Professional Wrestling Interview Segment".

My friend Wendy's was on Jell-O usage by homemakers during WWII, and it was something like 250 pages. There seems to be a lot of room for variation.

By: abbyladybug

abbyladybug — Wed, 25 May 2005 07:42:51 -0800

140 pages for my Ph.D. in School Psychology. It was a single-subject design model looking at a homework internvention for disorganized 6th graders. I did the study in a local elementary school. I was in a dissertation group at my university with people from all over the school. The longest papers were usually from these departments: English, Communications and Culture, and Linguistics. When there's a study involved, a lot of the work is in the design and data collection. If it's all theoretical, there are usually many more refs and more length. I was told that at 140, mine was long for my department.

By: seanyboy

seanyboy — Wed, 25 May 2005 08:12:55 -0800

About 70 pages. "Autonomous Classification by Connectionist System" (or something like that). It was rubbish.

By: swordfishtrombones

swordfishtrombones — Wed, 25 May 2005 08:18:53 -0800

215 pages on fluid dynamics; slightly above average (150)

By: absalom

absalom — Wed, 25 May 2005 08:21:50 -0800

My MA Thesis in History (A historical case study of onlne BBS communities in the 80s and 90s) was around 120 pages.

I know that Gordon Wood's PhD dissertation ended up being published as an 800 page book.

By: Rumple

Rumple — Wed, 25 May 2005 08:27:26 -0800

M.A. thesis was 255 pages all told, on ground stone technologies. Ph.D. was 222, on merging practice theory with quantitative geographical models in archaeology. When published, both shrank to less than 100 pages. I have since seen an 810 page M.A. thesis (three volumes) on neanderthal burial practices go by, but that was just plain bad supervision.

By: Saucy Intruder

Saucy Intruder — Wed, 25 May 2005 08:45:56 -0800

My law review comment was 137, which was outrageously long. Shortened to 79 for publication.

The Mrs.'s was 10 (visual art MFA).

By: Dr. Wu

Dr. Wu — Wed, 25 May 2005 09:23:17 -0800

Mine's about 320 (in film history), but I guess you already knew that. ;)

By: dness2

dness2 — Wed, 25 May 2005 09:28:01 -0800

117 pages right now, global economics. I may get a couple more pages of glorious verbage about it's importance out of it before I defend next week.

By: karmaville

karmaville — Wed, 25 May 2005 09:31:10 -0800

80 or so pages for "Autocremation in Chinese Buddhism" for my undergrad. My advisor who did the same topic for his PhD was about 175, and no, he neglected to tell me he had the same topic until after I was 4 months into the topic.

By: u2604ab

u2604ab — Wed, 25 May 2005 09:56:17 -0800

Biophysics, 130 pages. Note that when formatted for publication in a journals, there's about a 10-fold reduction in page count. (A recently published 2-page Journal of the American Chemical Society communication took 20 pages in my dissertation.)

By: synecdoche

synecdoche — Wed, 25 May 2005 09:56:21 -0800

Haven't finished mine yet, but the department likes the (M.A.) thesis to be 90-120 pages (in Interdisicplinary Studies, English and History focus, in my case).

By: ontic

ontic — Wed, 25 May 2005 10:04:28 -0800

Philosophy, about 150 pages, on a fairly specific topic. Chrisgrau is right about the length of philosophy theses, though I've seen dissertations in logic that were less than 40 pages.

And I'm handing mine in today (!!), defense in a week.

By: gsb

gsb — Wed, 25 May 2005 10:08:45 -0800

185 pages, P.hD. in Biochemistry. I don't think there's much difference in the thesis length between countries, but there's quite a few quirks in the defense protocol.

By: handee

handee — Wed, 25 May 2005 10:09:24 -0800

What an interesting range of sizes and areas. AND Wow congratulations ontic!

By: Dr. Wu

Dr. Wu — Wed, 25 May 2005 10:16:14 -0800

ontic, I defend in a week, too! congratulations!

By: handee

handee — Wed, 25 May 2005 10:18:14 -0800

When i finally finish mine, I'll probably have to wait 3 months or so for the viva. I can't believe you lot find out so soon.

By: Dr. Wu

Dr. Wu — Wed, 25 May 2005 10:23:10 -0800

handee, I submitted my draft (which I'm still revising ... when I'm not reading AskMe) about 3-4 weeks ago. I think the time between submission and defense varies wildly by school and department (I'm at the U of Wisconsin-Madison). Very glad to be almost done with the damn thing.

By: 445supermag

445supermag — Wed, 25 May 2005 10:23:58 -0800

"Spin-Label Electron Paramagnetic Resonance Characterization of Heterogeneously Functionalized Dendrimers", ~200 pages in bound form, more than half was appendices though (spectra, computer code (C, C++, awk scripts) written for simulations).

By: mummimamma

mummimamma — Wed, 25 May 2005 10:42:07 -0800

I did mine in Latin, on Martial and his poems about/to Domitian. 110.000 words + 30 pages of original text & translation (did them side by side). Which was supposed to be standardish in my department (in Norway), but a third shorter than that of my fellow student.

By: bricoleur

bricoleur — Wed, 25 May 2005 10:57:39 -0800

Looks like you have all the data you need, handee, but since I so seldom get the opportunity to mention that I have a doctorate (in philosophy): 160 pp.

By: achmorrison

achmorrison — Wed, 25 May 2005 11:19:57 -0800

I'm only on page 58 of my PhD thesis in physics. The last guy who got his degree from here had an 85 page thesis including references. I'm comforted to hear about other short theses in physics/science, especially after seeing 600 page monstrosities in Chemistry in our library.

By: bonehead

bonehead — Wed, 25 May 2005 12:13:01 -0800

Achmorrison, those chem one are long for one reason only: bags and bags of spectra, chromatograms, diagrams, structures etc.... It's easy to be long when you include every damn measurement you took over the four (three, five, seven) year it took to finish the thing. A good supervisor will tell you to throw 80% away, but not everyone has a good supervisor.

By: jb

jb — Wed, 25 May 2005 12:38:41 -0800

I haven't written one, but I'm reading a 512 pp History Ph.D. thesis. Unfortunately, it's not very good.

By: Flitcraft

Flitcraft — Wed, 25 May 2005 15:50:24 -0800

About 300 pages - 17th century Calvinist conversion experience

By: joaquim

joaquim — Wed, 25 May 2005 16:10:06 -0800

PhD, Plasma Physics: Streamer Formation in a Gas in Electric Fields of High E/p -- 34 pages

PhD, History: Was Flashman Right? -- Leadership in the Crimea -- 322 pages. (I'm not kidding you, either. The paper was a study of Fraser's presentation of the British leadership in Flashman at the Charge. Sometimes I'm ashamed of myself.)

I think hard science papers are shorter because it's easier to marshal facts to prove or disprove a thesis. Softer sciences require you to back up what is often little more than an informed opinion.

By: biffa

biffa — Thu, 26 May 2005 03:12:48 -0800

I haven't written one, but I'm reading a 512 pp History Ph.D. thesis. Unfortunately, it's not very good.

I would recommend that any PhD student read a completed and passed thesis that is not very good. It cheers them right up. It's the good one's that are depressing.