Although it may feel like it at times, you are not the first person to write a dissertation. Use this to your advantage! There are multiple ways to draw from the work of existing dissertations that have already been completed and published. This blog walks through 5 Values of existing dissertations and how they can make your dissertation and life easier. In short, you can review published dissertations to get ideas for formatting, for the literature that should be cited and referenced, for scholarly voice, for current conversations in the literature, and even, for what your advisors might be looking for. In other words, you are not alone and can use published dissertations to get past many of the barriers that doctoral students experience. Before we get to the 5 values of existing dissertations, let’s talk about how to choose the first dissertations to review. Ideally, you will have access to a dissertation that was recently defended in your program on a topic that is similar to yours and had the same (or similar) committee as yours. This might be a bit of a unicorn for some- it may simply not exist, but these are the factors you will want to look for if you want all of the value to come from a single dissertation. You may start by asking your committee chair for recommendations or by contacting recent graduates from your program. If this doesn’t lead you to anything useful, then try searching for dissertations in EBSCO Open Dissertations or ProQuest Dissertations and Theses. Your school may even have its own dissertation database. If you are not sure about how to find this, try contacting a research librarian at your institution for recommendations. Finally, you can often find dissertations just by Google searches. Be sure to include the topic, school, and a recent year (2021 at the time of writing this blog) in your search.

1. Get Ideas for Formatting by Reviewing Existing Dissertations

If you are trying to get an idea of what the formatting looks like, you will want to reference a dissertation from your school (and likely from your program within your school). All schools have directions for formatting, but these guidelines are not all the same. They have different formats and even different levels of detail in how to format dissertations. Of course, you will always want to start with your school/program’s guide for formatting, but sometimes it is just easier to visualize what the formatting looks like to get a better idea of what they are looking for in that area. It can be bigger issues (like what sections to include in a chapter) or smaller issues (like what spacing to use for the Table of Contents or if the abstract should be listed in the Table of Contents). You can assume that a published dissertation has gone through the review to finalize formatting to the school’s liking, but be sure that formatting templates have not changed since the sample dissertation was published.d2. Ideas for the Literature This one is probably my favorite. Although your literature review is original work, there is so much you can learn from other literature reviews on the same or similar topics. For example, review different dissertations on your topic to get an idea of how they organized the literature. Sometimes it is helpful to even review the table of contents of different studies to get some ideas on the different ways it can be done. You might find that a similar outline will be useful for your study or that you can adapt the outline to be a better fit for your study. Next, reviewing published literature reviews may give you a good start for other studies to review. If they are writing on a similar topic, then there are likely citations that you will also want to look up and read or even cite for your own literature review. Finally, published dissertations are a good place to brainstorm theories or conceptual frameworks related to your topic.

2. Get Ideas for Scholarly Voice by Reviewing Existing Dissertations

Scholarly voice is a tricky one since this is not something that is easily taught. The best way to improve scholarly voice (academic style writing) is to read academic articles and to practice writing as an academic. This is one area where students can work with coaches or editors to improve their own writing. In the meantime, you may find it helpful to pay close attention to the wording in published dissertations. Note how they have worded key sentences like the problem statement and the purpose statement. Also pay attention to the use of passive versus active voice and how they reference researchers. Published dissertations have been through the scrutiny of a doctoral committee and are likely to exhibit academic writing.

3. Get Ideas from Current Conversations in the Literature by Reviewing Existing Dissertations

You want your contribution to the literature to be relevant. If you can’t find recent dissertations that are even remotely related to your broad topic, you may want to step back and reassess the relevance of your work. Some research is truly exploratory in that it is approaching a problem that is not well studied, but even then, you should be able to see where it fits into the extant literature. Reviewing dissertations is a good way to get an idea of current conversations in the literature. If you can’t find many dissertations or even peer-reviewed articles on your topic from the past few years, you might need to think about what you are studying and if there is really a current issue leading to your problem. Most dissertations on the topic should give an idea of what current discourse is taking place around this topic, including any contrasting views.

4. Learn what your Advisors Might be Looking For by Reviewing Existing Dissertations

If you are lucky enough to have access to dissertations that your committee advisor also chaired, there is a lot to learn from this. As much as we like to pretend that research is objective, so much of it is actually subjective and comes down to the preference of the chair and other committee members. I recommend starting with asking your chair if there are any dissertations that they chaired and would recommend. If there are, then ask what they think the strengths of this dissertation are- this will give you an idea of what should be replicated from the sample dissertation. Was it something about how they outlined it, something about the writing style, something about the conclusions they reached, or even something about the actual problem or approach? By this point, you have probably realized that published dissertations can be used in many different ways. One that I haven’t mentioned- published and existing dissertations are completed dissertations and should remind you that it is possible. The goal of completing your dissertation as the last milestone of your doctorate is an attainable goal. Completing a dissertation is an achievable goal and published dissertations should remind you of this while also giving you ideas of expectations and rigor in regards to doctoral research. Use these existing dissertations to your advantage and to help you become Dr. You!