Making Sure Your Dissertation Doesn't Get on Top of You

Case Study 12 Dissertation Case Study

Making sure your dissertation doesn't get on top of you

The following notes are by a student writing a dissertation on 'The construction of interests and identity in the EU's relationship with South Asia'. They show how important it is both to analyse and understand your own working practices, and realise that by taking the time to re-group your thoughts and focus on what you want to achieve you can get your dissertation back on track.

'A confession: I'm not pleased with the work I've done on my project so far because I believe it has been insufficiently focused and thought-out. In theory I have been conducting a literature review; in practice I've been reading articles and books and documents as I find them, without having first carried out a survey of the existing literature in order to prioritise or at least order what I read ... I've found it hard choosing effective search terms in databases, and indeed in choosing my databases, so that surveys using these databases have not been very effective and not pulled up many relevant results. When this happened I became frustrated and went back to reading what I found as I found it; what I should have done was re-evaluated my search technique.

'Looking back ... I feel ... I am back on track. I have found relevant papers ... even though my reading over the past few days has been rather less directed than I would have liked, I think I can rationalise it – the documents I was reading were documents I would have read eventually in any case, so I have not 'wasted' time, as such. A key realisation, though, is that I must maintain perspective and always aim to know why I am doing what I am doing when I am doing it. Obviously.'

· What are your first steps for finding information for your dissertation?

Ask yourself the following questions:

· How many different concepts can I split my topic into?

· What words would I expect to find in books/articles/websites relevant to those concepts? Think of as many synonyms as you can.

· Can any of those words be spelled differently?

Once you've answered these questions, you can then search more effectively for information.

· What types of information will you find in different sources?

Type of information / Resources that might have that information
Established facts and figures / Reference books; official publications; government web sites
General information on a topic / Books of collected articles; text books; web sites of relevant organisations
Reviews of the literature on a topic / Journal articles; books of collected articles
Publications of recent research results / Journal articles; proceedings of conferences
Professional and academic debates / Journal articles; web sites of relevant organisations; newspapers

You can access the following from your library:

· Databases - to find information on journal articles and conference proceedings.

· Catalogues - to find books and journals.

· Subject gateways - to find web sites (gateways collect links to quality-assessed sources).

Remember: time spent on figuring out what type of information you want will pay for itself in the long run by saving you time running searches on irrelevant sources, and saving you the stress of not knowing where your research is going.