king's college dissertation guidelines

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We're here to help you, whether you are in the discover, focus or action phase of your career journey., it’s dissertation time(line).

Written by Silje Undlien, Third Year War Studies undergraduate at King’s College London & Student Enquiries Officer at King’s Careers & Employability.

The dissertation. Whether you’re an undergraduate or postgraduate student at King’s, it’s something you have to go through as part of your degree. You might consider it one of the most important challenges of your academic career. Or it’s just one of those things you know you have to get done.  Most students start off with a great deal of enthusiasm about their dissertation, but the scale of the project can easily throw them to despair. Whatever you might be feeling about writing your dissertation, it’s important that you discover how to devise and stick to a work schedule. Often, it’s the sticking to that will create problems. So how do I go about creating a dissertation timeline or work schedule, and why should I have a timeline at all?

The short answer is that I can’t really give you an answer. No single way of creating a dissertation timeline or work schedule will satisfy the needs and methods of every student. Everyone has their own way of doing things! But being organised is still key. You need to be realistic about your deadline and, more importantly, your time management skills. So, to get started, here are some questions to ask yourself:

• What type of dissertation am I writing?
• Am I an undergraduate or postgraduate student?
• How much time do I have to write my dissertation?
• How is my course organised? Am I doing my dissertation alongside other modules and commitments?
• Am I choosing my own topic? Or is my department choosing the project for me? Perhaps it’s a module-based project?
• What am I expecting from myself?

All of this will impact on how your dissertation research might progress. Especially important is realising just how much time you really have to get your project done. If you’re an undergraduate student with modules and coursework to do alongside your dissertation, it’s easy to get lost in the idea that you have a full year to write your dissertation. (Trust me, I’ve been there!) Realistically, however, you will only have a few months. Your full year is actually just an academic year. And from this academic year you’ll need to factor in time off, holidays, illness, part-time work, and all the other commitments you might have going on in and alongside your course. It might be the most general tip I can give you, but it’s an important one: Get started ASAP!

The first step is to learn your methods. One of our Marketing Assistants, currently writing her postgraduate dissertation, recently said: “You really do need to learn your methods. I’m still getting to know mine.” So ask yourself: How do I normally organise my work? What are my habits, good or bad? Your dissertation is probably going to be your biggest project yet, and, though you might be telling yourself that you’ll get rid of all your bad work habits, chances are you’ll fall into a similar routine or pattern of organising and doing your work to what you’ve done before. Have you normally been the last-minute essay writer? Establishing your own methods of studying is the first step to getting organised. I’m not saying that you should write your dissertation last minute, even if that’s your established method of getting work done. All I’m trying to point out is that you’ll be better-equipped to deal with the big task of writing your dissertation if you know yourself, and, importantly, if you create a work schedule which accommodates this knowledge about yourself, your work ethic, and your time management skills. It’s all about realistic planning…

So, how can I get organised? You’ll need to find a system that works for you. The most important thing is to find a way to write down a list of tasks or action points. Some people might prefer to set vague deadlines, while others will create a ‘Study Matrix’ (see example below) with detailed information abut how and when things are going to get done. Point is, it can be as detailed (or not detailed) as you like. It might be a good idea to plan out when you’ll have your meetings with your supervisor, and to pin-point what you’d like to discuss in each meeting. Ask your supervisor to help you create a set of action points after each meeting, so that you have a rough idea of what you need to do before the next one. If you feel like your supervisor is not pushing you enough; ask them to! (Stay tuned for a more detailed blog post about how to communicate with your supervisor!)

I mentioned before that finding a system can often be less problematic than making yourself stick to it. (Cheers to you, fellow procrastinators!) So what can I do to stay organised?  First of all, you should identify and deal with procrastination. Find out why you procrastinate and what you might do to avoid it. You might want to minimize distractions, ask someone to check up on you, or create a reward system. You should also find out in what kind of environment you work best. How, when, and where do I best stay focused? You can also try using Tomato Timer , a time management technique created for a more productive way to work and study. Secondly, it’s important to have emergency plans. What happens and what will I do if I experience unexpected delays? Staying organised is also about understanding that things are not going to go just the way you planned it to, and to find ways to deal with this without losing sight of the end goal.

On a final note, remember to schedule enough time for proof-reading and touch-ups, to edit with fresh eyes, and to make lots of backups as you go! It will also be useful to locate any departmental information or guidelines for dissertation-writing. So there you have it! It’s dissertation time!

Copyright for Postgraduate Research Students

Once your PhD has been awarded you will be required to submit an electronic version for the university’s records. The electronic version of your thesis will be hosted in King's institutional repository  Pure   and made available on the internet via the from end of Pure called the  Research Portal . An e-thesis made available in this way is considered to be a publication. As such, it is important to ensure good academic practice on citation of 3rd party material incorporated into the theses. This includes all images, graphs, drawings, etc - anything the author did not create themselves.

Modest amounts of 3 rd  party material can be included in a PhD theses under the copyright exception of fair dealing for criticism or review. If more extensive amounts of material are included permission may need to be sought from the rights owner. If permission isn’t granted a decision will need to be made about whether to risk keeping the content is it is, substituting other content, or redacting problematic material in the etheses version.

Please see  here  for more information about copyright and etheses.

Please see  here  for more information about intellectual property for postgraduate research students.

• Your Copyright
• Last Updated Aug 24, 2022
• Answered By Pete Garner

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PhD Thesis Template for King's College London

This is an unofficial LaTeX template for King's College London PhD Thesis submissions which is modified from the template for CUED to meet the current requirements of King's. Please check them at https://www.kcl.ac.uk/campuslife/acservices/researchdegrees/students/format-of-thesis-and-binding before using this template. The usage details of the template can be found at: https://github.com/kks32/phd-thesis-template

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Searching for Systematic Reviews & Evidence Synthesis: Further information

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Further reading

• Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions The Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions is the official guide that describes in detail the process of preparing and maintaining Cochrane systematic reviews on the effects of healthcare interventions. more... less... The current complete version of the Handbook is 5.1 (updated March 2011), edited by Julian Higgins and Sally Green.
• 4.S1 Technical Supplement to Chapter 4: Searching for and selecting studies [Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions]

Social Science Systematic Reviews

Systematic review (sr) toolbox- currently off-line temporarily, may 2024.

Systematic Review (SR) Toolbox  is a searchable online catalogue of tools to support systematic reviews, which aims to help reviewers find appropriate tools based on their needs. It uses a simple, yet flexible, classification system to classify tools based on how they provide support for the systematic review process.

Undertaking a systematic review involves the systematic storage, management, validation and analysis of large quantities of data; activities that can be error prone and time consuming. Automated tools (i.e. software), therefore, can be used to support many aspects of the systematic review process.

For example, the SR Toolbox contains details of Risk of Bias software and websites including RoB 2, ROBINS-I and other risk of bias tools and checklists.

Although the focus of SR Toolbox is on identifying software to support systematic reviews, other tools or support mechanisms (i.e. checklists, guidelines and reporting standards) can also be found.

PROSPERO: Register your systematic review

PROSPERO is an international database of prospectively registered systematic reviews in health and social care. Key features from the review protocol are recorded and maintained as a permanent record. PROSPERO aims to provide a comprehensive listing of systematic reviews registered at inception to help avoid unplanned duplication and enable comparison of reported review methods with what was planned in the protocol.

Consider registering your systematic review and also searching to see whether a systematic review on your prospective topic has also been registered in order to avoid duplicating research.

PROSPERO includes details of any ongoing systematic review that has a health related outcome in the broadest sense. Systematic review protocols registered on PROSPERO can include studies of any design. Work is underway to facilitate the inclusion of reviews of pre-clinical studies. 

Other registers of systematic review protocols include the Cochrane Collaboration, Campbell Collaboration and Joanna Briggs Institute. There are also some journals which publish Systematic Review protocols e.g. BioMed Central's Systematic Reviews.

If your Systematic Review does not fit PROSPERO's criteria e.g. a review of pre-clinical studies then you could consider publishing your protocol on a site such as Research Gate , figshare or Open Science Framework (OSF ) or INPLASY (note there may be a charge for registering with this site).

Scoping reviews also can't currently be included on PROSPERO. The  PRISMA guidance for scoping review s (PRISMA SCr) suggests some locations for registering the protocol including  Open Science Framework .

Can't access the full text? Interlending and Document Delivery

All King’s College London staff and students as well as staff from King's Health Partners are eligible to make requests for books and articles for teaching and research purposes that aren’t available in the King’s collections.

Requests can be made for books, journal articles, theses, dissertations and other publications. 

Students and staff are allocated a number of free requests at the beginning of each academic year. For more information on how to place a request and to see the annual allocation please visit the  Interlending and Document Delivery page .

If you are aware that the systematic review you are undertaking will rely heavily on material that King's does not subscribe to or that you cannot gain access to via other libraries such as the Senate House Library or the British Library then you should first contact the Library  for advice and to discuss your specific needs . If you expect to make a large number of requests then it may be necessary to agree with you an approximate time frame for obtaining the requested material that will not adversely affect other customers of the service.  In the majority of cases you will find that the free annual allocation will be enough, particularly for systematic reviews limited to the English language in the health, clinical & life sciences fields.  

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Digital Humanities

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“comprehensive odyssey”, a digital critical repository of the odyssey and its sources: perspectives and consequences..

Supervisor: D'Alessio, G. B. (Supervisor) & Lavagnino, J. D. (Supervisor)

Student thesis : Doctoral Thesis › Doctor of Philosophy

‘Don’t @ me’: analysing online expression affordances on IRC and Twitter

Supervisor: Saunders, M. (Supervisor) & Ajana, B. (Supervisor)

USE OF THE ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING METHOD FOR THE RESTORATION OF CERAMIC AND GLASS ARCHAEOLOGICAL ARTEFACTS

Supervisor: Earl, G. (Supervisor) & Sully, D. (External person) (Supervisor)

The Web of Community Trust: Amateur Fiction Online: A Case Study in Community Focused Design for the Semantic Web

Supervisor: schraefel, M. (External person) (Supervisor)

The Use of Self-Tracking Technologies and Social Media in Self-Representation and Management of ‘Health’

Supervisor: Ajana, B. (Supervisor) & Ridsdale, L. (Supervisor)

The story of Occupy Wall Street: Narratives of politics and identity on Twitter

Supervisor: Gerbaudo, P. (Supervisor) & Jordan, T. (Supervisor)

The script of Matthew Paris and his collaborators: A digital approach

Supervisor: Crick, J. (Supervisor) & Stokes, P. (Supervisor)

The roles of the malcontent on the early modern English stage

Supervisor: Lavagnino, J. (Supervisor) & Massai, S. (Supervisor)

The Liberator’s Labyrinth: Stand-alone, Read-only Hypertext Fiction and the Nature of Authority in Literary & Hypertext Theory

Supervisor: Lawrence, F. (Supervisor) & Denard, R. H. (Supervisor)

The history and politics of civilisation: the debate about Russia in French and German historical scholarship from Voltaire to Herder

Supervisor: Bourke, R. (External person) (Supervisor)

The English contribution to the emergence of manuscript culture in eleventh-century Norway and Sweden

Supervisor: Stokes, P. A. (Supervisor) & McCarty, W. (Supervisor)

The Effects of the Internet on Collective Democratic Action in China

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The Development of Black Led Archives in London

Supervisor: Flinn, A. (External person) (Supervisor), Bressey, C. (External person) (Supervisor) & Bunn, J. (External person) (Supervisor)

The area told as a story: An inquiry into the relationship between verbal and map-based expressions of geographical information

Supervisor: McCarty, W. (Supervisor) & Lavagnino, J. D. (Supervisor)

Technical narratives : analysis, description and representation in the conservation of software-based art

Supervisor: Hedges, M. (Supervisor) & Laurenson, P. (External person) (Supervisor)

Supporting unsupervised context identification using social and physical sensors

Supervisor: Muller, H. (External person) (Supervisor)

Spatial Perception Mediated By Locative Media: Walking Through Connections In London

Supervisor: Dunn, S. E. (Supervisor) & Earl, G. P. (Supervisor)

Smudges on the glass: Tracing and locating the museum in the British Museum’s digitised collections.

Supervisor: Blanke, T. (Supervisor) & Adams, R. (Supervisor)

Rethinking 3D Visualisation: From photorealistic visual aid to multivocal environment to study and communicate cultural heritage.

Supervisor: Dunn, S. E. (Supervisor)

Relative and Dynamic Aspects of Variation in Response to Lexical Repetition: A Corpus-Based Case Study of The Translations of Faulkner's The Sound and The Fury into Lithuanian, Polish And Russian

Supervisor: McCarty, W. (Supervisor)

RELATIVE AND DYNAMIC ASPECTS OF VARIATION IN RESPONSE TO LEXICAL REPETITION: A CORPUS-BASED CASE STUDY OF THE TRANSLATIONS OF FAULKNER'S THE SOUND AND THE FURY INTO LITHUANIAN, POLISH AND RUSSIAN

Private in public: addressing the ethical, legal and curatorial issues of digital oral history.

Supervisor: Hedges, M. (Supervisor) & Geoghegan, B. (Supervisor)

Methods of Building Sustainable Digital Communities and Co-Productivity from Crowdsourcing in the GLAM Sector

Supervisor: Dunn, S. E. (Supervisor) & Hedges, M. C. (Supervisor)

Measuring the Impact of China’s Digital Heritage: Developing Multidimensional Impact Indicators for Digital Museum Resources

Supervisor: Tanner, S. (Supervisor) & Oreglia, E. (Supervisor)

Long-form Journalism and Archives in the Digital Landscape

Supervisor: Blanke, T. (External person) (Supervisor) & Coté, M. (Supervisor)

Supervisor: Blanke, T. (Supervisor) & Coté, M. (Supervisor)

Heritage and Digital learning: understanding how communities learn about Cultural Heritage from online content and how it can be embedded in traditional education

Supervisor: Earl, G. (Supervisor)

Governing Data in Modernity/Coloniality: Astronomy Data in the Atacama Desert and the Struggle for Collective Autonomy

Supervisor: Powell, A. B. (External person) (Supervisor) & Couldry, N. (External person) (Supervisor)

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Supervisor: Tanner, S. (Supervisor) & Dunn, S. (Supervisor)

Evaluating computational creativity: a standardised procedure for evaluating creative systems and its application

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Digital Narratives in Physical Museums. Narrative Construction with Contextual Technologies: The Di Casa in Casa Chatbot and the Museum of Augmented Urban Art in Milan.

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Data, Camera, Action: Screen Production in a Streaming Era

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A Tweet at the Table: Black British Identity Expression on Social Media

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A  syntax-based  approach  to  the  language  of  causality  in  Thomas Aquinas.   The   case   of principium and causa (Summa   Contra Gentiles, books I-II). Explorative study and first results.

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Supervisor: Lenci, A. (External person) (Supervisor) & Marotta, G. (External person) (Supervisor)

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EIS PhD Research Proposal Guidelines

The research proposal is the most important part of your PhD application. We do not expect the proposal to be perfect at this stage, nor do we expect you to stick to it rigidly, as your ideas will almost certainly change once you start to study. However, we do expect it to show convincing evidence of your ability to plan and organise independent research. Please read and follow the guidelines carefully. 

Your proposal should be 2,000-3,000 words long , plus bibliography, using the following sections: 

• Title  – The best titles are simple and descriptive, identifying the topic and approach that will be taken.
• Central research question and objectives  – The question your research seeks to answer should be stated simply, then fleshed out to show to show why it is timely and important – both intellectually and politically – for you to be writing a PhD on this topic. After that, you should state, in straightforward terms, how the PhD will answer the research question.
• Literature review – Here you must show how your central research question relates to existing academic studies in your field. This requires a short literature review which will situate your proposed research within the framework of the dominant perspectives on similar issues in the existing literature. Ideally, you should be able to demonstrate how your proposed research fills a gap in the literature and therefore adds substantively and can make a lasting contribution to academic debates. One key criterion for writing a successful PhD is that it is original work, so you must try to avoid setting up your analysis in a way which simply replicates work which can already be found within the literature.
• Theoretical framework – Here, you should detail what theoretical framework(s) will underpin the analysis in your PhD, why that framework has been chosen, and what advantages it gives you for addressing your central research question.
• Case studies and methodology – Here, you should discuss the type of empirical research (statistical work, interviews, surveys etc.) that you will be doing and the case study/case studies that you have chosen. This is essential in all cases except for abstract political theory PhDs. You should show how your theoretical framework informs the methodology that you will use and why that methodology is particularly advantageous for answering the research question.
• Problems – Here, you should reflect on any problems you think you may encounter whilst undertaking your research and indicate how they might be overcome or mitigated. These might include, for example, access to data.
• Bibliography  – You should include a complete bibliography for the proposal.

The above draws on the advice issued by the Political and International Studies department at Warwick University.