Determining the length of dissertation introduction; how long it should be?

The length of introductions may largely vary depending on the area of discipline and the nature of the project that you have decided for your dissertation as your reader should get the first glance or main idea of the purpose of your research through the introduction phase so it should be including a background, problem statement and your scope of the study. You should discuss this with your supervisor how much detail you need to put in this part of the dissertation. Also, it can be a good idea to read a few relevant researches related to your field to have a better idea that according to your field of interest, how much length your introduction part must-have.  

The introduction of the whole dissertation can make up roughly 10 percent of the total word count. So if you are doing a dissertation writing of 40,000 - 60,000 words, you might include a 4,000 - 6,000-word introduction. And if you are writing a dissertation of 15,000 - 20,000 words, your introduction can be 1,500 - 2,000 words long.

Regardless of the type of project that you have chosen for your research, the introduction to the thesis or the dissertation should give a broad overview of the project, and should generally be discussing the following aspects of the dissertation:

·         Identify the problem statement or phenomenon clearly and accurately, but it should also be precise and focused on the topic of your research. As you have to discuss these things in more detail in the next chapters to come, hence in the introduction, you need to be very brief with it.

·         Provide background information for the topic you are exploring. For this aspect, you can either include a summary of the previous research on your topic or you can include a survey of the history of occurrence of the problem. In either cases reader should get an idea of the background knowledge of the research topic you have chosen.

·         Explain the value or significance of your research, immediately after describing the background or the brief history of your topic. The significance of the research can be demonstrated by describing the overall impact of the problem, its mysterious nature, and its complexity with effect to its occurrence and persistence, and the number of people or regions affected by it.

·         Indicate gaps, problems, misconceptions which might be present in your field of research and which you have found in the published research of your topic and you need to give ideas and suggestions on how your research aims to fill those gaps, resolve the problems and fix any misconceptions by presenting new ways of perceiving and understanding the situation.

·         Introduce the methods and approaches briefly, which you have adopted or planned to investigate the topic or the problem. It is not necessary that your methodology has to be new, but it should prove to be the most potentially effective.

·         Outline the aims and objectives of your research. The aims and objectives of a dissertation or thesis should be clearly stated, and they must be reasonable and attainable. Also, it is advisable that they should be displayed as a list or number them in order of their importance.

·         Present your research questions and hypotheses. For the most efficient and effective means of defining your research more clearly, it is essential to determine exactly which research questions and hypotheses you will be working on.

·         Define or clarify any key theories, any specialized terminology or vocabulary or any unusual abbreviations or concepts that you will be using extensively within your dissertation or thesis.  

·         Provide a brief summary of the contents of your thesis or dissertation. There should be a summary in your introduction that includes briefly your aims and objectives and the road map of your research in your introduction and in this way the reader gets a somewhat clear picture of what the research is all about.

·         Explain all the ethical considerations which may be associated with your research and its methodology. Usually, ethical issues arise in the research which often uses living subjects, and there might be some regulations from some organizations or your university about how to use such subjects while you are doing your research.

By summarizing above points, it can be observed that the introduction of a dissertation can be of a small percentage of the whole dissertation, but it needs to have some brief description of almost all the processes and the important details of your dissertation. For instance, the primary goal of any scholarly introduction is to set the stage for writing about the procedures and results of the research.

You, therefore, need to provide the readers of your research with everything they need to understand the nature, value and meaning of your research that you are going to describe in greater detail in the chapters and sections later to come. If you have achieved this, then you have written an introduction lengthy enough and worthwhile reading.

 

About the Author,

Catlin Fisher is a full-time blogger and part-time academic writer at "Dissertation Masters." He is a mechanical engineer by profession, but he loves writing as his passion, and he has written some wonderful articles on academic development and motivational topics. His hobbies include swimming, football, and hiking.