What is it about?
More and more PhD students in the humanities and social sciences choose to write their theses as a collection of articles instead of a single monograph. This format, common in the natural sciences, offers benefits such as earlier publication and clearer milestones, but it can also create new challenges when applied in other fields. This article discusses what happens when this model is transferred to the humanities and social sciences. It highlights typical difficulties for both supervisors and doctoral students, and suggests three ways to meet them: taking a holistic view of the thesis, ensuring coherence between its parts, and anchoring the work in shared theoretical and methodological ground.
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Why is it important?
The article contributes to an ongoing shift in doctoral education by addressing the increasing use of article-based theses outside the natural sciences. By identifying key challenges and proposing concrete strategies, it offers supervisors and doctoral students practical tools to improve both the writing process and the final outcome. The discussion helps institutions better understand how to adapt the article-based model to different disciplinary traditions.
Perspectives
The article encourages reflection on how academic genres evolve and travel between disciplines. It invites scholars to think critically about how writing practices shape both the research process and what counts as knowledge. By acknowledging the distinctive nature of humanities and social science research, it also opens space for more flexible and context-sensitive doctoral education.
Mr Kristian Niemi
Karlstads Universitet
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Utmaningar och angreppssätt i processen att skriva sammanläggningsavhandling inom samhällsvetenskap och humaniora, Högre utbildning, November 2023, Cappelen Damm AS - Cappelen Damm Akademisk,
DOI: 10.23865/hu.v13.5745.
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