Let’s explore how to elegantly ‘wield’ the dissertation sword to penetrate the fortress of academic knowledge! In this article, we will provide you with a detailed and practical guide to writing a dissertation, which will help you to easily cope with the challenges of writing a doctoral dissertation.
As a first step, let’s start with the framework to smooth out the overall structure. Firstly, I will spend almost half a month on the literature review (LR). This phase involves a careful reading of a large number of relevant research studies in order to better understand the current status and trends in the research field. After completing the literature review, I will choose an appropriate empirical method (e.g. OLS, etc.) to test my hypothesis.
Next, I will move on to the data analysis phase. Here, I would recommend that you run the data first as the results may not be significant or certain factors cannot be found in a reliable source. This way, you can always redirect your research to avoid getting stuck. Writing the empirical methods section will be exceptionally easy after the data analysis is complete.
I will then provide an in-depth discussion of the literature review and empirical findings and revise the empirical methodology. During this process, you may find that there are elements of the previous literature review that are not actually relevant to your research topic. At this point, you may want to consider replacing these elements or keeping them for the time being to increase the word count of your article.
Next, I will work on the introduction, conclusion, and abstract. Be sure to allow enough time to complete these sections, as they may be more work than you expect.
In terms of topic selection, I strongly recommend that you fully consider the feasibility of data collection before deciding on a topic. For example, you can get an idea of the amount of literature on the topic by using a keyword search on Sciencedirect. Additionally, you can look at a few of the most relevant articles to get an idea of the databases and models they used. If you come across software or models that you are unfamiliar with and which are more complex to operate, then please choose carefully.
When citing literature, I recommend that you cite as much as possible from top journals, such as Accounting Review, Journal of Financial Economics, and so on. You can refer to the ABS List to assess the rank of the journals. My supervisor specifically emphasised this in the feedback he gave me on the opening question, so I will intentionally pick high level journals in my subsequent citation choices.
When searching for literature, you will need to find key papers. Typically, these papers are published in top journals by well-known scholars. You can review multiple articles on related topics to find those papers that are widely cited. You can then go through the reference lists of these papers to find out what other literature they cite.
To make it easier to manage your references, I recommend that you use an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of them. You can categorise all the articles you have read by whether they are cited or not, title, author, year and approximate subject. In this way, when you feel at a loss when writing a literature review, you can simply look up the relevant topic and get instant inspiration.
When it comes to citing literature, I recommend using the tool MyBib. It generates a citation format by typing in the name of the article directly, so it is especially important to create a summary table of references. For articles not found by MyBib, you can try searching with Google Scholar. Please note that you will need to install the Google Scholar Button plugin in order to copy the citation format directly. In the end, you just need to fine-tune it to your school’s specific requirements.
In terms of touching up and reducing duplicates, I ended up with a 19% check rate, with one item accounting for 2% and the rest of the components being under 19%. I think that as long as the total duplication rate is kept under 20% and the individual items are not too high, then there should not be too much of a problem. Due to time constraints, I did not seek the touch-up services of others. The method I used was to purchase a Qillbot Premium account from Taobao. This site can provide excellent paragraph rewriting services Problems occurred, please try again later.
