Many doctoral students know how to navigate their discipline’s style guide, but they do not always know that they are required to follow their university’s style guide or their program’s dissertation style guide as well. This blog both explains how a discipline’s style guide works with a dissertation style guide and outlines some of the advice I’ve given to doctoral students in the writing center for using these two guides together.

Finding a balance between talking about other people’s work and your own analysis in an essay can be hard. You want to demonstrate that you’ve done the research necessary to support your points but avoid accusations of plagiarism. What balance should you strike? Here are four questions to ask yourself to determine whether or not you need more citations—or if you have too many.

We have talked about why literature reviews are important to the academic endeavor, looked at what components a literature review has, and discussed how to determine its intellectual quality. Now that we understand literature reviews as a genre, we can get practical: how do we write a literature review?

The previous blog post in this series talked about why literature reviews are important to the academic endeavor and how the process itself makes a person into a credible scholar and a researcher. This blog post looks at the components of a literature review and discuss how to evaluate its contents.

A good dissertation literature review is much more than a technical exercise. The process of constructing a lit review initiates you into your discipline’s practices, making you into a scholar and researcher in your field and establishing the value of your own research.

Changes to dissertation research are expected. In fact, these changes can make your project better.