How to Write a Better Thesis

83

Chapter 7

Establishing Your Contribution

Think back to when you began your research project. In all likelihood, you wanted
to do research because you were intrigued by or eager about something. Perhaps
your ideas were vague or ill-formed, and even possibly you were happy to join any
existing project in a broad area. But soon you developed a definite problem that you
were working on, with the intention of making a contribution to your field.
The part of the thesis I discuss in this chapter is where you begin to present
and argue for that contribution (though I would be stunned to see a thesis chapter
with that heading). In the introduction and background chapters, you established
the setting on which the contribution rests; in the results, discussion, and conclu-
sion chapters to follow, you will demonstrate the extent to which your contribution
is correct, complete, and significant. But let me stress that I use ‘contribution’ here
only as a convenient label to cover a wide variety of alternative kinds of structure
and content; and also that, in some respects, the whole thesis is a contribution, from
your novel analysis of the background literature to your approach to interpretation
of results.
Also, observe once again that in some disciplines—particularly disciplines where
the research is progressively published during the course of the project—a larger
thesis such as a PhD may be made up of a series of linked contributions rather than
consisting of a single consolidated piece of research that resolves a single question.
In such disciplines, the ‘contribution’ may be spread across several chapters, each
with a self-contained mini-thesis–like structure of research question, innovative
proposal, results, and analysis. For convenience, the discussion here is of a thesis
with a single contribution, but the guidance applies to any kind of thesis structure.
Another disclaimer: the diversity of contribution in different theses means that
any specific advice on how to present this chapter or sequence of chapters is likely
to be wrong or inappropriate. This is an area where you need to be led by examples
from your own discipline. There are however good general principles to observe,
as I now discuss.

D. Evans et al., How to Write a Better Thesis, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-04286-2_7,
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014