COREBreadth of coverage sequence of chaptersFigure 3.2

as unmanageable. Gradually a focus on something resembling the much narrower final topic is reached. At this point there is often an interregnum of methodological throat clearing, or a chapter discussing some underbrush of other confuser topics.
By now readers are often deep into the thesis, maybe three, four or five chapters in. At last the author moves onto presenting the substance of their own research, which normally concerns only a small part of their initially sketched topic. These core results sections come late on in the overall text. After the core chapters there is often little space or time for authors to do more than pull together a quick analysis chapter. Anyway most of the possible theoretical interpretations relevant to the findings have usually been exhaustively discussed already somewhere in the vast literature review zone at the beginning. So the final chapter is typically scanty, making only brief links from the author’s own findings or substantive contribution back to the opening discussion of macro-themes.
The adverse effects of the focus down model on thesis authors are difficult to overstate. Research students typically spend far too long on their initial literature reviews or surveys,
trawling previous work, and often becoming engrossed in collecting small argumentative angles or comprehensive references. People can waste a great deal of time on gathering and understanding information about subtopics which later get cutout of the core focus of their PhD, or on appreciating controversies and viewpoints which then turnout to be tangential to their eventual research question. In the classical PhD model,
with a big book thesis as end product, the efficiency of your research effort can be measured by the proportion of your total work that shows up in some form in the finished thesis. The focus down model makes the normal tip of the iceberg problem much worse, often to the extent of writing off much of a year’s effort, or even 18 months work in extreme cases.
Of course there is often some kind of pedagogic or socialization rationale for making beginning students cut their teeth’
on a literature review. But more commonly the insistence on a focus down structure reflects supervisory or departmental imperatives. Supervisors favour the approach because it allows them to read themselves in on their student’s new and different topic more gradually. This way of doing things also has AUTHORING AP H D

safety first appeal for bureaucratic reasons. Students who are made to do a big literature review in their first year almost always generate a reassuring bulk of text, which offers proof of their application and hard work. Composing it also gives them practice in writing skills, even if the text produced has (can have) little original content. This course also makes it easier for departments to assess beginning students progress, following a maxim of Never mind the content, feel the width of text.’
In the classical PhD model, where there was little or no formal research training via coursework, literature reviews historically helped socialize new researchers into the discipline.
This past function is increasingly disappearing now, because virtually all PhD students have masters degrees and most PhD
programmes have strong coursework elements. But what supervisors did in their youth still tends to influence their current expectations. Also completing a literature review is now something that students can conveniently be asked to do while they are being tied down to stay at the university by the new coursework demands.
But letting this period of your research goon much beyond your first four or five months will typically show sharply diminishing returns to effort. Students often become preoccupied with perfecting shallow, secondary criticisms of existing work.
This pastime may have little scholarly value, but people get locked into it because they have not yet begun their substantive or field research, and hence they still imperfectly understand the practical difficulties of doing so. Students often write literature review chapters in a perfectionist tone, fastening terrier- like on smallish deficiencies of previous work without realizing the extent to which similar difficulties are likely to recur in their own research.
The alternative possibility to wasted effort is that once people have expended precious research time on extraneous elements, they maybe unwilling to cut this material out. Instead they try to cram it in somewhere in their final thesis. Students are understandably reluctant to write off already completed chapters, even if this work has ceased to connect with their current research interests or central question. Instead they feel that they have to commit more time to keeping their early chapters integrated into the final thesis, even when the linkage is bogus,
P LAN NI N GA NI NT E GRATED THESIS 7

creates misleading expectations amongst readers, or imperils the intellectual coherence of their doctorate. Long early sections, written in their beginning years, are also frequently scattered with hostages to fortune, calculated to alienate examiners. Sloppy critical judgements or superficial treatments in these chapters are often not reappraised later on, partly because the student’s own accumulating research experience and expertise may no longer relate to them closely.
The implications for readers are equally unfortunate.
Experienced PhD examiners are inured to slow-starting theses.
They will usually page through opening literature review chapters quite quickly, not expecting to see much that is not already thoroughly familiar. But if they get 80, 100 or 150 pages into the thesis (or even 200 pages in some instances) without meeting any value-added material at all, their patience will typically begin to wear thin. They may begin to question the originality of a thesis with so much secondary analysis included and to wonder if it really meets the standard fora doctorate. Students often imagine that readers will closely scrutinize their small critical comments and discussions in early chapters and ascribe them far more importance than they actually will. To get a more realistic view, think about how you approach books in your own field. Most of us are quite cynical and critical with new stuff, prepared to gut books for their real value-added elements. We are also initially rather sceptical of accepting authors judgements until they have established their credibility as original researchers. Readers of PhDs are no different. They will tend to see your secondary analysis commenting on other people’s work as pretty lightweight or dispensable until you have established your own credentials as an original researcher.
At an early stage in the thesis they still have no reason to take you seriously, or to believe that your criticisms are grounded in an awareness of research realities.
When readers do eventually reach the author’s own research materials in the focus down model, their narrowness or detailed specificity may seem quite disappointing after the wide sweep of work and flashier intellectual themes initially discussed. And the speedy wrap-up ending to the thesis, inadequately linked back to the introductory themes, may leave readers asking so what and struggling to workout what they have learned from AUTHORING AP H D

the thesis as a whole. The whole effect maybe that the thesis ends not with a bang, but a whimper’.
6
The opening out model
There are better ways of sequencing material in along text. In the physical sciences the normal approach is the opening out’
model shown in Figure 3.3, which works in an almost reversed manner. The first element in the sequence is a deliberately short and terse specification of the research question. It focuses tightly on the immediate issue to be tackled and gives only a brief discussion of the most recent relevant literature, plus a very compressed amount of essential setup information. The second element, beginning within (say) 30 pages of the start,
presents the author’s key research findings and results. This is followed by a section of applied analysis, which tracks back and forth across what has been found out, and connects it up in detail with previous research and literature. Finally, once the author has convincingly established their research credentials the thesis opens out into a discussion of the wider themes or theoretical implications arising from the research and discusses possible avenues for the next phase of work in the field.
P LAN NI N GA NI NT E GRATED THESIS Analysis and close literature
Discussion and wider literature implications

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