What’s the difference between a Master’s thesis and a doctoral dissertation?
A doctoral dissertation is often defined as “a book-length work of publishable quality.” As such, it is usually divided into chapters and covers a fairly broad area, for example, the entire output of a major author, or works by multiple authors. A Master’s thesis, by contrast, is much shorter and more narrowly focused than this. Usually an MA thesis is divided into short (10-20 page) sections rather than longer (25-40 page) chapters. Rather than focusing on all of the works of a particular author, it might focus on one or two. Because of this, it is sometimes observed that a successful doctoral dissertation contains the work of three or more MA-length theses.
