Dissertation and Thesis Length by Major

Interesting share. Reading time: 1 min

I came across this some time ago, found it highly interesting and want to share it:

The author of this blog, Marcus W Beck ran an analysis (well, another one in 2013) of masters theses and doctoral dissertations archived online at the University of Minnesota.

I can't write better captions than the original author, so I will quote the original author:

Doctoral Dissertations Page Length by Major

"Fig: Summary of page lengths of doctoral dissertations by major, sorted and color-coded by median. Boxes represent the median, 25th and 75th percentiles, 1.5 times the interquartile range as whiskers, and outliers beyond the whiskers. Number of records for each major are in parentheses".

Major Theses Page Length by Major

"Fig: Summary of page lengths of masters theses by major, sorted and color-coded by median. Boxes represent the median, 25th and 75th percentiles, 1.5 times the interquartile range as whiskers, and outliers beyond the whiskers. Number of records for each major are in parentheses".

Some cautions about the data:

• Some of the majors have low sample sizes (represented by the number next to the major, in parentheses) and may not be representative of other theses/dissertations out there. The lowest sample size for a major is 5.
• There are a few outliers that are longer than the 500 and 250 page and are not listed on the plots.
• This data is gathered and plotted by a program and not verified individually (there are far too many).

Now obviously, quantity is by no means a measure of quality. The nature of some majors just happen to allow for important knowledge to be documented with less context and with less words, while other require more context and more words. Or data, graphs and photos etc.

I would love to learn more about what causes the differences in conciseness.