:-)

Just wondering how long people's lit reviews are as a proportion of their overall word count. Am submitting in a few weeks and am starting to worry about these things.

Anyone want to share?

My first chapter (combined intro, lit review and brief methodology overview) was about 7000 words long. My whole thesis was about 70,000 words long. I'm a humanities student.

My original literature review was 97 pages long, but as a thesis is not much over 200 pages (excluding the appendices) and there's going to be 11 other chapters in mine, I think it's going to be about 10, 000 words.

I was hoping for so much more from this topic :p

I haven't written mine yet! but I do have about 6 or 7 7000 word separate pieces which I wrote early on, so I'm going to pull out the key info from them and hopfeully end up with a literature review that's about 10,000. I wouldn't be surprised if it goes over though, because I'm looking into so many areas that its hard to cover them all (which my sup has said I do have to do :-( ).

My hubs' thesis is 130 pages so far - in total. But he's maths based, so most of it is funny equations with lots of those sigma sign things - it looks like a blackboard of a nutty professor in a hollywood movie.

Sciences here, but mine is quite long for that, I'm currently at about 12000 and have been asked to include extra tables and stuff, so god knows how much longer it will be. Really would like to shorten it though...

I'm still in the research stage but mine is currently around 10k words and it will get longer - although looking at it some that is no longer appropriate will be removed. My thesis is supposed to be about 80k words, I've written drafts of 5 of the chapters which all need expanding and its around 60k in total so far! I'm hoping to keep it to about 10k to leave enough room for the data and analysis (I'm in humanities)

Thanks all.

I'm currently waiting for confirmation on the maximum I can get away with, as mine stands at 20000+ in a 80000 word thesis. I'm so pissed off that I let this happen, and that I've basically written at least 8000 words I didn't need. But I guess that's all part of the process. It's no different to writing a load of stuff early on then later having to lose it.

Anyway, soon be over. Have to submit on 8th Oct. Time to get pruning, then finding new words in other sections to fill the gap!

I'm in humanities and my lit review is looking to be 45,000 words or more, seeing as I'm reviewing various case studies to develop a model to then apply to my own case study. I thought that unless you were running around gathering primary data most of our thesis would be reviewing what was done previously?

My work is so interdisciplinary that it became clear one lit review wouldn't work. So I am doing a review of the literature that covers the general theme I am working on as part of the introduction but it won't be very long. Then for each chapter I'll be reviewing the relevant literature as part of that chapter so overall who knows how many words it will be. Is anyone else working like this?

I really want to reply "no, it''s what you do with it", but that's not very helpful :p

I was kind of disappointed I didn't get this response straight away.

Just had a very useful answer from a very important person at my uni. He says that there is no word limit for a lit review, or any section for that matter. It's all a question of whether you feel you can justify what you've done to the external. If you can, then no problem.

Personally, I feel I can justify my length. (Claudia, over to you).

I had a short literature review at the start of each of chapters 2-6. But short, so I don't worry about how much these chunks count to the literature review count from chapter 1.

I always consider the breadth far more important than the length :p Under normal circumstances the bigger the girth the better, but the problem you'd have is that you'd then be well over wordcount.... Ithink most thesis are maybe only around 3" - you get up to 4 or 5" and you've got an issue..... :p