Blog

A thesis by publication has to survive every peer-review revision to every paper without a full reformat each time. Master documents, consistent styles, one reference library, and where an AI drafting aid actually helps.

Text encoding, network analysis and text mining can be a history PhD’s original contribution in their own right, not just a way of processing sources — with named tools (TEI, Programming Historian, Old Bailey Online) and an honest AI-assisted workflow.

The UK Data Service, the European Social Survey (31 countries, Round 11), UK government statistics, World Bank Open Data and the Uppsala Conflict Data Program are the core sources a UK political science or IR PhD is built on.

HEFCE projected that 72.9% of full-time UK/EU doctoral starters in 2010-11 would qualify within seven years (about 80.5% eventually), and 96% of candidates who sat a viva at 14 UK universities passed; HESA publishes no equivalent headline PGR completion rate.

A comparison of corpus linguistics, close reading and stylistics, and discourse analysis for a linguistics or literature PhD, with a worked example and named frameworks from McEnery and Hardie, Leech and Short, and Fairclough.

Seven recurring methodological objections UK psychology examiners raise — HARKing, unchecked assumptions, missing effect sizes, unreported instrument reliability, uncorrected multiple comparisons — and how to close each before submission.

EPSRC Industrial CASE (IDLA) studentship terms, IP ownership, confidentiality and what actually has to go in the methods chapter when a computer science PhD studies the candidate’s own tech employer.

A comparison table and worked example showing when Mayring’s content analysis, Braun and Clarke’s thematic analysis, or Fairclough’s discourse analysis fits a sociology or social work PhD’s data.

STROBE items 13 to 16 govern how a cohort study’s results chapter must be structured: participant flow, descriptive characteristics, outcome data and main results, each with its own specific reporting requirement.

Only 36% of CSEW-measured crime incidents were reported to police in YE March 2026, a national statistic that reshapes how a criminology PhD should recruit victims, and it is covered here alongside the Victims’ Code, access routes and trauma-informed design.