Dissertations look very different across disciplines, but they share an underlying skeleton. This file extends §5 of the synthesis with Andrew Maynard’s reformulation of that skeleton — written to be more accommodating to the range of doctoral work that actually exists, including transdisciplinary work and forms that strain the synthesis’s original framing — and his stance that the form of a dissertation is properly field-dependent, with the form serving the scholarship rather than the reverse. Consult when a user is locating themselves in their own dissertation structure, choosing a form, or trying to understand whether what they are doing actually counts as the right shape.
Dissertations look very different from each other. A philosophy thesis, a quantum physics thesis, an autoethnographic study, and an engineering systems design read like four different kinds of document, because they are. Underneath, though, they share a skeleton — and the skeleton is what doctoral examiners read for, regardless of how it gets dressed.
The synthesis lists the skeleton in §5. This file restates it in slightly more accommodating language, because the original framing leans on conventions of empirical research that don’t fit every kind of doctoral work cleanly.
Eight elements — really, eight things any dissertation has to do.
A driving question, claim, or problem. Not always researchable in the empirical sense; sometimes a thesis to argue, a puzzle to dissolve, a phenomenon to render visible. But always: a defined target the work moves toward.
A positioning. What has been said in the conversation this work joins; what is missing or contested; where this particular work sits.
A frame. The conceptual, theoretical, or methodological lens through which the work is conducted.
An approach. What the work actually does — experiment, argument, ethnography, simulation, design, reflection, system-building. Method in the broadest sense.
The material engaged. The data, sources, texts, lived experience, artefacts, code, or measurements the work draws on or examines.
Analysis, argument, or interpretation. How the material gets engaged — through statistical analysis, philosophical argumentation, narrative interpretation, formal proof, or other means.
Claims or contribution. What the work demonstrates, argues, or shows that wasn’t there before.
Limits, honestly named. What the work cannot or does not claim.
The reformulation matters because the synthesis’s original labels — researchable question, evidence, results — read as biased toward propositional, empirically-tested claims about an external world. They work for most science and most quantitative social science. They strain when applied to philosophy, qualitative interpretation, autoethnography, design research, or other forms where the researcher, the material, and the contribution take different shapes than the standard model assumes. The labels above aim to be robust across science, social science, philosophy, data science, engineering, and the major variants in between, with autoethnographic and practice-based work accommodated even where the wording stretches.
Beneath the eight elements is a deeper invariant: a dissertation has to defend a move from one state of understanding to another. The reader, after engaging the work, should be able to say something they could not have said before. The “something” might be a claim about facts, a clarified concept, a reframed argument, a new way of interpreting existing evidence, a working artefact, a method that opens a class of questions. The form is plural; the requirement is not. Understanding has moved, in a positive direction, and the dissertation is the public record of that move.
The eight elements show up in different forms across these. A physics PhD might close a small experimental gap, with the apparatus as the material, the measurement as the contribution, and the limits set by what the apparatus could and could not resolve. A philosophy PhD might reframe a tired argument: the texts are the material, the conceptual analysis is the approach, the contribution is the new framing, the limits are the cases the framing does not address. A social science PhD might reinterpret existing data through a new analytical frame; the data is the material, the frame is the analytical lens, the contribution is what becomes visible. An engineering PhD might design a system that does something nothing else does, with the system itself as the material and the design choices as the warrant. An autoethnographic PhD might work through the researcher’s situated experience, with that experience as the material and the rendering as the contribution. Same skeleton; different scholarship.
How methods are approached, in turn, varies widely from one discipline to another, in ways that are worth being explicit about. In much of the social sciences, the expectation is mastery of formal methods and the discernment to select and apply them well — methodological training is foregrounded in the doctorate, and the demonstration of that mastery is part of what the work is judged on. In much of the natural sciences (and engineering, and many computational fields), the expectation is closer to the question drives the method: the researcher identifies the gap, the problem, or the question, and then works out what tools they need to master, adapt, or build to address it — sometimes developing new methods in the process. The methods skill in this mode is more often picked up through self-directed learning and hands-on use than through formal coursework.
What I advise students across areas of scholarship — and what holds across the variation — is to start from the question. Identify the knowledge gap. Identify the question. Identify the thesis. Then work out what tools you need to master or develop to bridge it. The methods serve the scholarship, not the reverse.
The form a dissertation actually takes — monograph, three-paper, hybrid, practice-based, portfolio — is field-dependent, and properly so. I have students who have followed many different formats; what matters is that the form follows both the field and the individual scholarship, not that the form be the same. The synthesis covers the major variants in §5.
What I push back on is the reverse: form taking precedence over scholarship. The aim of a doctorate is not to show that a student can write and publish in a specific format. The aim is to demonstrate scholarship and to develop the intellectual capacities that come with it (see fnd_phd_for.md). The precise form of the dissertation is secondary to the purpose. Where the form starts to drive what counts as a successful dissertation rather than the other way round, the same Goodhart-flavoured failure that haunts rigor (see fnd_rigor.md) starts to creep in: a measure mistaken for the thing it was supposed to measure.