Confused about how to choose a perfect Dissertation Topic?

Every long journey starts with a tiny step and so does the journey of writing a 20,000 words dissertation. But in the case of dissertations the step needs to be taken very sensibly and with a lot of care and mindshare.

A topic for writing a dissertation can be of many shapes and sizes, but there are a few basic rules to it. Your topic can be of either three words or three sentences long but it should clearly state what a reader will find in your dissertation. The topic shouldn’t be vague or carry a load of ambiguity along with it.

They say that never judge a book by its cover but the perception about judging it by its topic is not said. The topic should be valuable to your related field of study.

After deciding on the field of your dissertation, perform a Literature search – Find resources like books, journals and websites from where you can have an access to the data and then decide which area of your field will be provided with the most data.

Discuss your possible topics with your dissertation advisor to highlight you on how can it be made more realistic or practical.

Make your topic specific! Don’t select a broad topic as it will increase your research work and wouldn’t be much of an interest. E.g. “the mobile phones industry” – choosing this as a topic will no doubt give you enough data to write a 50,000 words dissertation but your dissertation would be a non-interesting crap about the industry. You should rather select an area of the industry and be more specific, like; “the mobile phones industry – the role of multimedia” this way you will have to focus on a particular segment of the industry making your dissertation interesting, precise and not a 50,000 words of crap about which company in the industry has the largest number of employees!

Base your topic on either or all of these three;

Feasibility – Decide which topic will be most feasible to complete in the given time limitation and your resources.

Interest – Evaluate yourself! When you study a specific field what area interests you the most? If you are interested, writing about it will make easy and tempting.

Convenience - Try to select a realistic field for dissertation, the more realistic the more clear your topic. The main reason for choosing a realistic and practical area is that it will open many doors to resources for getting the required data.

Selecting these steps as guidelines for deciding on your dissertation topic is likely to help you to get a prefect topic which will be interesting for you and your readers and will add great value to the field on study.

How to write APA dissertation citations?

The APA Dissertation Citations are driven set of standards to follow while formatting your dissertation citations which is also known as the APA Format. It not only provide a complete manual on writing citations but also gives formatting procedures for writing headings, margins, use of bold and italics etc.

While writing a dissertation you have to gather data from lots of different resources and that data have to be valid and true. For proving your accuracy and getting a 10/10 on the data collection criteria you must cite your resources within the text of your dissertation or in the reference list at the end of your dissertation.

APA dissertation citations means, presenting your citations in an APA format. Normally we gather information from journal articles, books, websites and encyclopedias. An APA has developed sets of standards to be followed while citing these references.

In-Text APA Dissertation Citations:
While citing with in the text of your dissertation; use the surname of the author (omitting any suffixes such as Jr.) followed by the year of publication separated by a comma in parentheses: e.g.

In a recent study of reaction time (Rogers, 1994)


Reference List form of APA Dissertation Citations:

While writing the citations in the reference list you may follow these color codes;

1. Author(s)
2. Date
3. Title of Book
4. Title of Article
5. Title of Periodical
6. Volume
7. Pages
8. Place of Publication
9. Publisher
10. Other Information

Journal Article:
When citing an article, start with the author name then the date of publication in parentheses followed by title and the subtitle (if any) of the article and the volume # of the journal and lastly the page/s number: e.g.
Lacayo, R. (1991, April 22). Global warming: A new warning. Time, 137(16), 32.


Books:
Citing a book, follows similar rules as of an article, the author, date of publication, title and subtitle. For a book citation after the subtitle the edition followed by the place of publishing and the name of the publisher should also be mentioned.

Stehle, P. (1994). Order, chaos, order: The transition from classical to quantum physics. New York: Oxford University Press.

Encyclopedia or Dictionary:
Encyclopedias and dictionaries are books which are frequently updated and have information gathered from other resources. They may have an author or they are compiled an organization. They will also be cited in the same way as a book: e.g.

Schneider, I. (1989). Bandicoots. In Grzimek’s encyclopedia of mammals(Vol.1, pp. 300-304).
New York: McGraw-Hill.

Subatomic particles: quarks and antiquarks. (n.d.)*. Retrieved September 8, 2004, from Britannica Online.

*(n.d) no date; which means that the publication date for the article is not available but the date on which the article was retrieved from the source is mentioned.

Website:
Websites are major source providers for data for your dissertations and you have to cite them as well. Start with the author name (if given) followed by the date of publication, title, date of retrieval. But the web address or the link to the source will be mentioned under ‘other information’; e.g.

Bryant, P. (1999). Biodiversity and conservation. Retrieved October 4, 1999, from
http://darwin.bio.uci.edu/~sustain/bio65/Titlpage.htm


APA Dissertation Citations for the different types of resources follows a basic format but slightly differ on the basis of the types of resources. APA Dissertation Citations helps create uniformity between different dissertations and makes the dissertation easy to read and providing references in a more detailed manner.

Dissertation Writing In 3 Easy Steps

Writing dissertation can be a very challenging task, which requires complete concentration at all stages. These stages can categorized into three levels, first the pre-writing stage, second the writing stage and third the post writing stage.

At the first stage prerequisite ingredients of the dissertation writing should be considered and some questions should be taken into account for this purpose a questionnaire can be prepared listing some fundamental questions, for instance, what is the purpose dissertation? For whom is the dissertation written for? What is expected of the dissertation? What goals should the dissertation achieve? Once these questions are taken into account by the writer, he or she must move to the next level.

The second stage involves writing the dissertation itself. At this stage the theme of the topic must be finalized and the writer must know his objectives, it must be assured by the writer that answers to all the above questions are available in a written form, which should be reviewed frequently by the writer so that the grip on the theme of the topic must not be loosed at any stage. When writing the dissertation writer must take into account the approach of his readers and the language and style should be chosen with their respect. If the audience comprises of professionals or academics, for example, then technical language can be used.

Once a dissertation has been written it should be reviewed and checked properly by the writer himself and once again our questionnaire prepared in the very first stage must be looked so that the end result must be measured and analyzed with respect to it. When carrying out this review the writer should consider himself in the reader’s shoes so that complications and areas where the reader might have problems can be resolved at this stage. Although there isn’t any worldwide standardized way of writing a dissertation but considering the factors and ideas mentioned here can be useful in achieving desired outcomes.