Tutors 21 | - Freelance Writer
Jan 05, 2024 | #1
QUESTION I - How many sources?
I am doing research for my MA thesis (100pp) and really don't know how many sources are appropriate for a document this long. I have never written anything more than 20pp before, so this is uncharted water for me. Is there some acceptable range that I just don't know about?
Answer
Ah, you have come upon one of the most important principles of academic writing: for every formal written rule, there are two informal unwritten ones that are just as important! It is obviously very important to take the guidelines you have been given by your school very seriously - they may be called guidelines, but they are actually rules which, should you dare to break them, will cause you to fail, or at least rewrite your thesis. However, there is a huge mass of understood assumption which forms the bedrock of all academia, theses included.
One of these unstated but certainly understood assumptions is that you should have a given number of sources in a document of a given size. The number is not written in stone anywhere, which would actually be nice, so you have to take your best guess. Let's look at things in the small scale for a moment. How many sources would you include in a 10 page research paper? At any advanced level, especially at the graduate level, you wouldn't want to hand this paper in with fewer than 10 sources, taking both primary and secondary into account. On the upper end, 20 would be at the high end of acceptable. If you go below the bottom value, your paper can seem poorly researched, and if you go over the high end, it can seem wholly unoriginal. Simple multiplication would suggest that a 100 page thesis should therefore have from 100 to 200 sources, and this isn't a terrible range to work with. However, keep in mind that this paper should not look like 10 different papers piled into the same binding, but rather a series of interconnected chapters devoted to the same purpose. As a result, you will have more opportunity to follow a given secondary argument for a greater period of time, meaning you will not have to provide as many new sources. Also, when you consider that the number of primary sources you are using will remain relatively constant regardless of the length of your paper, you can see that 100-200 sources becomes an exaggerated figure. So, depending on your topic and the available materials, as well as your approach, a number between 50 and 125 sources should mark the effective range.
QUESTION II - Project already done
I have been researching my topic for three months and I just found a study that I had never heard of that does exactly what I was planning on doing! I feel like I have wasted all this time, and I have no idea where to go from here.
Answer
While this isn't every graduate student's worst nightmare (that would be getting up to perform your defense and realizing you are naked), it is certainly in the top 10. I know this must be disappointing, because originality means so much in contemporary academics, but there is definitely a bright side to this, and a reason to press forward. My own students often ask me what the purpose of academic research is, and I always respond to them that it is two-fold. First, you want to see what people are talking about in the discipline, and where the arguments are, to give yourself some direction and inspiration. Second, you want to make sure that your best and brightest ideas haven't already been done, and done better, by someone who has come before you. The academic community thrives on interesting overlap, but what value is there in doing work that has already been done, and saying precisely what has been said already? Not much.
Your research has run you into an unexpected wall, but it has allowed you to become aware of problem two listed above, and to correct it before your project begins in earnest. Imagine how you would feel if you were defending your research, only to have an examiner ask you how your study is different from study X, which is actually identical? You would then have wasted 4-5 years, and felt (understandably!) much worse. Now you are in a relatively enviable position. First, consider how nice it is that you have independently arrived at ideas which have been validated by a professional in the field. Also, the fact that neither your supervisor nor your committee members knew of the work puts you in a position of superior knowledge: you can now use this relatively unknown but related work as a platform from which to launch your own investigations. You must have had some idea about what your original research could be used to find after it was established - go to that next level and count yourself lucky to have given yourself this opportunity! You now get to fast-forward through the research path you had projected, something few students get a chance to do.
Answers by Sarah, truewriter4life@gmail.com
I am doing research for my MA thesis (100pp) and really don't know how many sources are appropriate for a document this long. I have never written anything more than 20pp before, so this is uncharted water for me. Is there some acceptable range that I just don't know about?
Answer
Ah, you have come upon one of the most important principles of academic writing: for every formal written rule, there are two informal unwritten ones that are just as important! It is obviously very important to take the guidelines you have been given by your school very seriously - they may be called guidelines, but they are actually rules which, should you dare to break them, will cause you to fail, or at least rewrite your thesis. However, there is a huge mass of understood assumption which forms the bedrock of all academia, theses included.
One of these unstated but certainly understood assumptions is that you should have a given number of sources in a document of a given size. The number is not written in stone anywhere, which would actually be nice, so you have to take your best guess. Let's look at things in the small scale for a moment. How many sources would you include in a 10 page research paper? At any advanced level, especially at the graduate level, you wouldn't want to hand this paper in with fewer than 10 sources, taking both primary and secondary into account. On the upper end, 20 would be at the high end of acceptable. If you go below the bottom value, your paper can seem poorly researched, and if you go over the high end, it can seem wholly unoriginal. Simple multiplication would suggest that a 100 page thesis should therefore have from 100 to 200 sources, and this isn't a terrible range to work with. However, keep in mind that this paper should not look like 10 different papers piled into the same binding, but rather a series of interconnected chapters devoted to the same purpose. As a result, you will have more opportunity to follow a given secondary argument for a greater period of time, meaning you will not have to provide as many new sources. Also, when you consider that the number of primary sources you are using will remain relatively constant regardless of the length of your paper, you can see that 100-200 sources becomes an exaggerated figure. So, depending on your topic and the available materials, as well as your approach, a number between 50 and 125 sources should mark the effective range.QUESTION II - Project already done
I have been researching my topic for three months and I just found a study that I had never heard of that does exactly what I was planning on doing! I feel like I have wasted all this time, and I have no idea where to go from here.
Answer
While this isn't every graduate student's worst nightmare (that would be getting up to perform your defense and realizing you are naked), it is certainly in the top 10. I know this must be disappointing, because originality means so much in contemporary academics, but there is definitely a bright side to this, and a reason to press forward. My own students often ask me what the purpose of academic research is, and I always respond to them that it is two-fold. First, you want to see what people are talking about in the discipline, and where the arguments are, to give yourself some direction and inspiration. Second, you want to make sure that your best and brightest ideas haven't already been done, and done better, by someone who has come before you. The academic community thrives on interesting overlap, but what value is there in doing work that has already been done, and saying precisely what has been said already? Not much.
Your research has run you into an unexpected wall, but it has allowed you to become aware of problem two listed above, and to correct it before your project begins in earnest. Imagine how you would feel if you were defending your research, only to have an examiner ask you how your study is different from study X, which is actually identical? You would then have wasted 4-5 years, and felt (understandably!) much worse. Now you are in a relatively enviable position. First, consider how nice it is that you have independently arrived at ideas which have been validated by a professional in the field. Also, the fact that neither your supervisor nor your committee members knew of the work puts you in a position of superior knowledge: you can now use this relatively unknown but related work as a platform from which to launch your own investigations. You must have had some idea about what your original research could be used to find after it was established - go to that next level and count yourself lucky to have given yourself this opportunity! You now get to fast-forward through the research path you had projected, something few students get a chance to do.
Answers by Sarah, truewriter4life@gmail.com