The best part about writing a dissertation is finding clever ways to procrastinate. The motivation for this blog comes from one of the more creative ways I’ve found to keep myself from writing. I’ve posted about data mining in the past and this post follows up on those ideas using a topic that is relevant to anyone that has ever considered getting, or has successfully completed, their PhD.

I think a major deterrent that keeps people away from graduate school is the requirement to write a dissertation or thesis. One often hears horror stories of the excessive page lengths that are expected. However, most don’t realize that dissertations are filled with lots of white space, e.g., pages are one-sided, lines are double-spaced, and the author can put any material they want in appendices. The actual written portion may only account for less than 50% of the page length. A single chapter may be 30-40 pages in length, whereas the same chapter published in the primary literature may only be 10 or so pages long in a journal. Regardless, students (myself included) tend to fixate on the ‘appropriate’ page length for a dissertation, as if it’s some sort of measure of how much work you’ve done to get your degree. Any professor will tell you that page length is not a good indicator of the quality of your work. Regardless, I feel that some general page length goal should be established prior to writing. This length could be a minimum to ensure you put forth enough effort, or an upper limit to ensure you aren’t too excessive on extraneous details.

It’s debatable as to what, if anything, page length indicates about the quality of one’s work. One could argue that it indicates absolutely nothing. My advisor once told me about a student in Chemistry that produced a dissertation that was less than five pages, and included nothing more than a molecular equation that illustrated the primary findings of the research. I’ve heard of other advisors that strongly discourage students from creating lengthy dissertations. Like any indicator, page length provides information that may or may not be useful. However, I guarantee that almost every graduate student has thought about an appropriate page length on at least one occasion during their education.

The University of Minnesota library system has been maintaining electronic dissertations since 2007 in their Digital Conservancy website. These digital archives represent an excellent opportunity for data mining. I’ve developed a data scraper that gathers information on student dissertations, such as page length, year and month of graduation, major, and primary advisor. Unfortunately, the code will not work unless you are signed in to the University of Minnesota library system. I’ll try my best to explain what the code does so others can use it to gather data on their own. I’ll also provide some figures showing some relevant data about dissertations. Obviously, this sample is not representative of all institutions or time periods, so extrapolation may be unwise. I also won’t be providing any of the raw data, since it isn’t meant to be accessible for those outside of the University system.

I’ll first show the code to get the raw data for each author. The code returns a list with two elements for each author. The first element has the permanent and unique URL for each author’s data and the second element contains a character string with relevant data to be parsed.