Articles
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Formatting a Thesis by Publication Without Retyping It Every Time a Paper Changes: An AI-Assisted Workflow (2026)
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…
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Digital Humanities in a History PhD: How to Frame the Thesis So Method Is the Contribution (2026)
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…
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Where Do UK Political Science and International Relations PhD Students Get Their Data? UK Data Service, the European Social Survey and Government Statistics, With the Figures (2026)
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…
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PhD Completion and Non-Completion Rates in the UK: What the Data Actually Shows (2026)
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…
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Which Analysis Method Actually Fits a Linguistics or Literature PhD? Corpus Work, Close Reading and Discourse Analysis Compared (2026)
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…
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Psychology PhD Vivas: The Objections That Get a Thesis Sent Back, and How to Pre-Empt Them (2026)
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…
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Doing a PhD Inside Your Own Tech Employer: iCASE Studentships, IP, Confidentiality and What Goes in the Methods Chapter (2026)
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…
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Content Analysis vs Discourse Analysis vs Thematic Analysis for a Sociology or Social Work PhD: Which Fits Your Data? (2026)
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.
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Presenting Results for an Observational Cohort Study in a Medical or Epidemiology PhD: Tables, Figures and STROBE Reporting (2026)
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…
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Researching Victims of Crime for a Criminology PhD: Access, Ethics and What the National Data Shows (2026)
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…