drumroll...........So far my thesis is 183 pages (handing in my 1st draft tomorrow) and my first study starts on page 70. I have 1.5 spaced it.

That thesis is 353 pages including Appendices. Mine is going to around 280 pages without References and Appendices. Worrying about the big size as well even though it will be within the word limit !

JUst printed my first full copy of my thesis...285 pages at 1.5 spacing, around 85K words. Seems long but easily within word limit of 100K! Best, KB

Well done! You're nearly there KB - be proud! (up)

Did Mendeley freak out?

Thanks Keenbean, seems mine will be around 98,000 (within the word limit) after I write the conclusion chapter which I am assuming to be around 8000 words. I also have 1.5 spacing. I do have some charts/graphs in one chapter which makes the page number increased to 280+ The references are not counted in the words right? My Uni does not say this clearly but colleagues say that the references, appendices, even acknowledgement pages are not counted...just the chapters !

Actually no :-) but because I created each chapter in differnt documents and used different versions of references, its citing lots of (2009a) (2009b) (2009c) which are actually all the same references, I'm going to have to do a long check for duplicates and make sure I don't delete the ones with the right info in (some have missing authors or journal names).

Cool! Would you recommend I write my whole thesis in one document? Btw what referencing style are people using? My uni doesn't recommend any. I like the (John et al., 2010) but can't seem to find that in Mendeley?

I use APA 6th. No I wouldn't recommend writing it in one document, mainly because word just can't seem to handle it, plus if you have auto saving on it takes longer etc. Its also visually a lot harder to work out what you're doing - well I find that anyway. I have folders for each chapter in my dropbox that include any writing and data collected - I find it much easier to work like that so you can go back to previous drafts of certain chapters but not others for example. And I always save my files with the date e.g. 'chapter 1 28-07-11'

Best not to chococake, in case you want to send your supervisors chapters to read. Just my opinion, but it's best to combine the lot when finishing your first complete draft.

How many pages did people use for their abstract?

Thanks sneaks and delta. What is the average total word count of the literature review section?

I've not written my abstract yet, but it will be under an A4 page, 1.5 spaced.

My word count (at the moment) per chapter is (ish)

Intro - 1,850
Lit review - 13,450
Method - 8,500
Study 1 - 13,210
Study 2 - 9,140
Study 3 - 11,750
Discussion - about 3,000 and counting - I reckon it will be about 6,000 though.

======= Date Modified 28 Jul 2011 15:25:25 =======
Belatedly replying to earlier posts in this. Dunleavy in his "Authoring a PhD" book recommends that chapters come in at around 10,000 words, for readability reasons if nothing else. Much much longer than this and they are too unwieldy for examiners to read. Much much shorter and they are probably lacking on content.

My thesis was 70,000 words long, in 7 chapters, averaging at 10,000 words each. But there was huge variation between the chapters. Possibly my shortest was my intro / literature review, which was about 6,500 words long. Another chapter was about 14,000 words long. The chapters were as long as they needed to be. But they still averaged at around Dunleavy's figure, not by design, but purely by chance.

I was a humanities (history) student.

======= Date Modified 28 Jul 2011 15:29:00 =======
My abstract was 1 page double-line-spaced, about 300 words long.