Destination Dissertation

In this concrete guide for Ph.D. candidates across disciplines, Foss and Waters approach the process of writing a high-quality dissertation as a vacation from normal routine—one that can be exciting, stimulating, and yes, accomplished in under one year. Your dissertation is not a hurdle to jump or a battle to fight; as this handbook makes clear, your dissertation is the first of many destinations on the path of your professional career. Destination Dissertation guides you to the successful completion of your dissertation by framing the process as a stimulating and exciting trip—one that can be completed in fewer than nine months and by following twenty-nine specific steps. Sonja Foss and William Waters—your guides on this trip—explain concrete and efficient processes for completing the parts of the dissertation that tend to cause the most delays: conceptualizing a topic, developing a pre-proposal, writing a literature review, writing a proposal, collecting and analyzing data, and writing the last chapter. This guidebook is crafted for use by students in all disciplines and for both quantitative and qualitative dissertations, and incorporates a wealth of real-life examples from every step of the journey.

The third edition of this groundbreaking guidebook supplements the core 29 steps of the dissertation with up-to-date discussions of citation management and the pros and cons of artificial intelligence in the research world. A new final chapter looks beyond the dissertation to springboard researchers into future publishing and career opportunities. Demystifying and charting a path from concept to completion, Destination Dissertation has helped thousands of doctoral students emerge on the other side of their dissertation as successful researchers. The third edition supplements the core 29 steps of the dissertation with new discussions of research technologies and now-popular dissertation sections like theoretical perspective, theoretical framework, and positionality statement. A new chapter looks beyond the dissertation to springboard researchers into future journal and book publishing opportunities.