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Dissertations & Theses

Explore tools and support to help you complete your dissertation or thesis.

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What is a dissertation or thesis?

A dissertation is an extended piece of academic writing on a question or problem related to particular subject. Usually done at the end of an undergraduate or master’s degree, this type of research project can take several months to complete.

A thesis is usually completed as part of a PhD. While similar in nature to a dissertation, a thesis is a longer project that tackles a question or problem in-depth and will take a number of years to write and research.

Whether you’re beginning a dissertation, or embarking on your PhD thesis, you’ll find it can be a different challenge to other assignments you’ve completed. These projects require you to bring together all the skills that you will have developed in your studies including: finding and evaluating literature, critical analysis, developing an argument, academic writing and referencing.

Your dissertation or thesis might also include things that you have not done before, for example developing a research question, analysing data or writing an abstract.

Process of writing a dissertation or thesis

Dissertations and theses are long and complicated projects. The processes you need to go through are likely to be iterative, non-linear and dynamic. However, it can be helpful to start by breaking the project down into the different stages, and approach each section of the planning, researching and writing process in turn. You then need to bring the stages together into a single piece of research.

A dissertation or thesis is an excellent opportunity for you to immerse yourself in your subject and a topic that you are passionate about. On the other hand, if you’re allocated a project, you’ll need to make the research your own and learn to understand why it’s worthwhile.

Your project proposal allows you to explore these initial research ideas, identify your aims, think around the context of your potential research and get ahead of any pitfalls by thinking about the feasibility and limitations involved.

Thinking about what you want to achieve with your research at this stage, will help inform how you approach your project.

Research Proposal Planning Tool

Literature review.

The nature of the research you do will likely depend on your subject area and research question. This may involve conducting interviews, gathering statistics, carrying out experiments or exploring texts and documents.

Most dissertations and theses will, however, involve a literature review as part of the research process.

What is a literature review?

A literature review sets the scene for your work. It places your research in context, and shows how it relates to and builds upon the work of others. It’s also your chance to tell people why your work matters, why it’s relevant, and how it contributes original research to your field.

In your literature review, you’ll discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the information you’ve found, and describe why you think it’s important. You might also want to discuss gaps in the literature that your own research will attempt to fill.

Literature Searching and Reading

Compiling a literature review involves rigorous literature searching, critical reading of information and combining ideas and research from different sources. You’ll need to develop an effective search strategy to ensure you find all the key information relevant to your topic. 

New research is published every day, and your work is likely to take you down paths you hadn’t thought about initially so you’ll need to frequently return to and adapt your search, and then update your literature review as you go. As part of your search strategy, it's important that you consider how you'll keep your research up to date, and how you'll manage all the information you'll find.

There are different types of literature review too, so check with your supervisor to make sure you know what is expected. If you’ve been asked to take a systematic approach, our systematic review guide can help you understand the systematic process.

Search strategy planning tool

Build your search strategy with our Search Planner tool. **Online planner**

Finding Information

Discover tips and advice for starting your search, selecting information types and using advanced search techniques.

Systematic Review guide

Find out about the systematic process and types of systematic review.

Mapping the literature

Downloadable resource to help you get an overview of your literature review reading. **PDF Download**

Three domains of critical reading study guide

A downloadable resource to guide your literature review reading. **PDF download**

An audio-visual guide to in-depth critical reading, for literature reviews. **Guide with audio**

Discover ways to critically evaluate the information you find.

Explore methods for effectively managing your documents and references.

Discover simple ways to keep up to date with information in your field.

Structuring a literature review

Explore different methods on how to structure your literature review.

Dissertation Structure

As this will be one of the longest academic documents you'll create, it can be helpful to start thinking about the overall shape of your dissertation early on, considering how many chapters there will be and how they'll relate to each other. This will be a provisional guide at first but having an idea of the structure can give you a way forward, help you to stay focused, and help manage your word count.

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Learn how to prepare, write and structure a science report.

Where to go for support

You will be given a supervisor for your dissertation or thesis by your academic school or institute. Your supervisor is there to give you advice and guidance about all aspects of your research project.

There is also support and advice available to you at each stage of your project from the services below:

University Library

For advice on planning your search strategy, finding and evaluating information, and managing your references.

Academic Skills Team

For help with managing your project, academic writing strategies, critiquing and reviewing literature, and developing a clear authorial voice.

Support for undergraduates and postgraduates with SPSS and data analysis.

Recommended books and e-books

For further reading related to dissertations and projects, browse our specially curated list of resources.

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Answered By: Matthew Armstrong Last Updated: Jul 05, 2023     Views: 1257

Theses held at newcastle university:.

You can search for a thesis held by Newcastle University at:

• LibrarySearch and
• theses.ncl.ac.uk .

Theses submitted to other UK institutions:

You can search for theses submitted to other UK institutions using:

• The British Library's EThOS service .

Theses submitted to overseas institutions:

You can search for theses submitted to overseas institutions using:

• The ProQuest Dissertations & Theses database, available via Library Search .

For further guidance and information:

Guidance on finding and submitting dissertations and theses using these and other methods is also available at the LibGuide web page:

• Theses and Dissertations Libguide .

Searching for a thesis using Library Search

This is much like searching for books and other items. You can search for the name of the author and / or the title of the thesis - LibrarySearch will return theses in the search results.

Searching for theses either by thesis type or by subject is not as straightforward.

Firstly, select Advanced Search. From here, change the first search field from Any to Publisher. After that, enter M.D. or Ph.D into the Contains field, depending on whether you are searching for a medical doctoral thesis or a non-medical doctoral thesis. Finally, change Material Type from All Items to Theses.

To search for theses by subject, you can combine the above with an Any Field keyword search.

The search above would find all the PhD theses published by the School of Chemistry, or with the word 'chemistry' anywhere else in the record. You could be more specific and change the Any Field to Title. This would only return PhD theses with 'chemistry' in the title, and not necessarily all PhD theses on the subject of chemistry.

Searching for a thesis using theses.ncl.ac.uk

theses.ncl.ac.uk is Newcastle University's digital repository for M.D. and PhD. level theses. Only theses submitted to Newcastle University appear in this repository - theses from other universities are not included.

If you search 'PhD' in the search box at the top of the theses homepage, you can see all the PhD theses produced by Newcastle University that are available electronically. You can then add a filter to search for a word contained in the title.

In the example below, theses with the word 'communication' in the title will be returned in your results. Make sure to toggle the Equals search function to Contains.

To search theses by School:

Return to the theses.ncl.ac.uk homepage.

First, click on Newcastle University.

Then click on the faculty you would like to search.

Following this, click on the department, institute, or school you'd like to search.

Once you've done this, you'll be able to see the theses that have been produced by a particular school.

For further guidance on finding and submitting dissertations and theses using these and other methods you can consult the following LibGuide web page:

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• Theses and Dissertations Libguide
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