Oh wow, Lara, thanks so much for the information! I need some quiet time to get through all this. One thing seems to jump out which, I think, fits in with me. I developed depression after the first 2 years on the PhD and am only slowly recovering with the help of my GP and others.

I will need to make a conscious decision to sit down and just write. :-)

Hi all,

long time lurker here. I am in my last stages (after 6 years) of a medical sciences/morphology-based PhD in Ireland and have to submit by September.

My problem is that I didn't do any writing at the beginning and find it very hard now to write the chapters. I am glad I am coming to an end now. I did my PhD part-time although registered full-time (I work in the same department) and I am not a traditional student as such. I went straight from diploma into working life and after some years I got the opportunity to register for the PhD. I thought I was registered part-time but surprisingly it was full-time and I have to submit now by September.

I am not confident at all although I have two peer-reviewed papers published as the main author in the two highest journals in my fields (there is an overlap in my PhD) and also two conference publications as well as some minor presentations but I am still not confident that it is enough. I have ideas for a third and maybe a fourth publication after the thesis but am not sure if I will even have a thesis by September :-(

It's just such a drag, I sit in front of the computer and know I should write, even a small paragraph or something but cannot bring myself to do it. I thought having the deadline and also having the external examiners confirmed (at this stage) would give me the boost to finish it properly but I found the exact opposite is the case.

Another problem is that there is no comparable thesis in our department which I could use as a model as no thesis has been produced in my field here since the 1940's! The general policies on thesis presentation are relatively general, structure, pagination, binding etc. but we don't have minimum or maximum amount of words and whenever I compare it to other Universities theses it feels like a fraud as there are much less pages or words.

By the way, I have a great supervisor who is available to me almost every day (he's just a couple of doors down from my office) but I still cannot get motivated enough to write the thesis. :-(

Any ideas to get out of this mire would be much appreciated ,-)

Danzig

You can look up the Journal Citation Reports through your Uni library (use ISI). It has the latest impact factors and you are not dependent on some from 2005 or so. Here's a link but you need access:

http://scientific.thomson.com/products/jcr/

Here's a little bit more on the Thomson Scientific Impact Factors:

http://scientific.thomsonreuters.com/free/essays/journalcitationreports/impactfactor/

I would say linear discriminant function analysis. You can calculate posterior probabilities.

Also logistic regression may be helpful as it does not only allow you to place the individual into one or the other group but also permits the calculation of a probability that this particular individual actually belongs into that group.

Yep, can only agree. When I started and did the reading and data collection I thought it was hard and tedious. Analysing the data was the next step and I thought that was hard as I had to learn more and more about statistics (and I absolutely hate maths). At some stage the whole thing cleared and I loved data analysis after understanding my data and the analysis tools. Now that I am writing up I can definitely say this is actually the worst part of it, or the most difficult part for me, anyway. The problem is I always find something else I think I have to include etc and I can't seem to get it all together, going back to some of the literature and putting bits and pieces together. So, yeah, writing the damn thing is a pain.

Apparently, you can even get government posts. Barry McSweeney was the government's chief science adviser but was removed when they found out that he got his PhD from Pacific Western University, "a US university known for selling qualifications" according to Diploma Mills News (Link: http://diplomamillnews.blogspot.com/2005/11/ireland-second-government-advisor.html. The chair of the Financial Services Ombudsman Council in Ireland, Con Power, apparently also got his Phd from Pacific Western.

There seem to be quite a lot of "universities" that offer PhD's and other degrees based on life experience or even just write up a thesis, wait 6 months and you get your PhD.

Personally, I don't know how people could feel proud or even good about obtaining a degree that way.

@missspacey

I am not sure how it works in other Unis/countries but here you would have to make the corrections and get a new copy bound with the corrections properly in place.

Congratulations, Doctor!

Thankfully in my field and our uni the word count counts, well, nothing. It's the content they are interested in and as long as that is up to standard you can have a 30,000 words thesis, nor problem. Maybe it all depends on what subjects you do it in. Mine is in medical sciences and my PhD director and supervisors are not interested in length of the thesis. They prefer good solid research results without any extra information disctracting from them. I am quite happy with that as my thesis definitely does not go up to 80,000 or even 50,000 words.

Doing my PhD in a particular field within medical sciences. First person usage in the thesis are a big no-no for our department and, in fact, the whole Uni.

Best thing to do is to look up the copyright transfer agreement you signed when your paper was accepted by the journal and see what they say about thesis/dissertation inclusions.