Doctoral Dissertation Sample Essay

Successful completion of a doctoral dissertation requires significant amounts of independent reading on the research topic. This allows the doctoral learner/researcher to become familiar with the scope of the topic and to identify gaps or tensions within the existing literature on the topic. These gaps and tensions become the source of the dissertation research. In this assignment, you will read and annotate potential sources for your dissertation topic. Those demonstrating the most merit to the best of your understanding of the topic at this time should be added to your Ref Works list for potential inclusion in the literature review section of your dissertation.Doctoral Dissertation Sample Essay

General Requirements:

Use the following information to ensure successful completion of the assignment:

It is recommended that you engage in this activity throughout the duration of this course.
Instructors will be scoring your submission based on the number of unique sources identified in the list submitted.
Download the resource Literature Review Resources Tool and use it to complete the assignment.Doctoral Dissertation Sample Essay
Doctoral learners are required to use APA style for their writing assignments. The APA Style Guide is located in the Student Success Center.

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Directions:

Read at least 10 empirical articles on your dissertation topic.

In the “Literature Review Resources” document, provide the following for each source:

The APA formatted citation.
A brief annotation of the key points of the source.
An indication of whether the source has been added to (Y) or excluded from (N) your Ref Works list.

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.
Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.Doctoral Dissertation Sample Essay

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.Doctoral Dissertation Sample Essay

Almost all dissertations in economics and business are of the “three-essays” variety, rather than conventional book-length treatises. The main reason is pragmatic: economics, management, finance, accounting, etc. are mainly discussed in journal articles, not books. Students writing treatises must spend the first year post PhD converting the dissertation into articles for publication; why not write them that way from the start? (An extreme example — perhaps apocryphal — concerns Larry Summers, who began teaching at MIT several years before receiving his PhD from Harvard. Rumor has it he forgot to submit the PhD thesis, and simply bundled three of his published articles and turned it in.)

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Some counter that the traditional model, or some variant of it, has value — for instance, the treatise conventionally includes a lengthy literature review, more than would be acceptable for a published journal article, which demonstrates the student’s mastery of the relevant literature. My view is that the standalone literature review is redundant at best; the student’s mastery of the material should be manifest in the research findings, without extra recitation of who said what. I tell students: don’t waste time putting anything in the dissertation that is not intended for publication!Doctoral Dissertation Sample Essay
The May 2013 AER has a piece by Wendy Stock and John Siegfried, “One Essay on Dissertation Formats in Economics,” on the essays-versus-treatise question. The evidence seems to weigh pretty heavily against the treatise:

Dissertations in economics have changed dramatically over the past forty years, from primarily treatise-length books to sets of essays on related topics. We document trends in essay-style dissertations across several metrics, using data on dissertation format, PhD program characteristics, demographics, job market outcomes, and early career research productivity for two large samples of US PhDs graduating in 1996-1997 or 2001-2002. Students at higher ranked PhD programs, citizens outside the United States, and microeconomics students have been at the forefront of this trend. Economics PhD graduates who take jobs as academics are more likely to have written essay-style dissertations, while those who take government jobs are more likely to have written a treatise. Finally, most of the evidence suggests that essay-style dissertations enhance economists’ early career research productivity.Doctoral Dissertation Sample Essay