university of edinburgh dissertation festival

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Dissertations and research projects

General advice and resources to support you throughout your research-based dissertation or project.

This is a general resource to help you with the basics of organising and writing a research-based dissertation or project.  The Go further section at the end includes advice on work-based dissertations and signposts other resources.

You should consult your course or programme information, including online sources, and project supervisor or programme director for subject-specific guidance.

Dissertations and research projects are an opportunity to focus on particular question, and plan and undertake your own research to explore it further.  Many students really enjoy being an independent researcher and becoming the expert on their work.  The format varies depending on the disciplinary context, subject area, your research questions and the project.  You may be reviewing the literature, analysing a novel, developing and testing a new method or doing a work-based project.  However there are some common factors:

• They are an independent piece of work.  You will be working under supervision to some extent and may be collaborating with others, but ultimately you are submitting a piece of independent thought and writing.
• They tend to have a large word count.  This is to allow you to do sufficient in-depth analysis and discussion of the topic.
• They require a large investment of time, thought and energy throughout the process.  As a significant body of academic work, you need to maintain effort whilst reading, researching, thinking, writing and redrafting it.

Choosing your dissertation or project

Whether you are choosing your dissertation from a selection of topics or you are proposing your own, there are a range of factors to consider.  For example:

• What is the starting point for your work, i.e. previous or related research?
• How feasible is your project / proposal?
• Do you have enough time and resources to complete it?
• Will it be of an appropriate academic level?

A key questions to ask is “How interested am I in this topic?”  You will be working on your dissertation or project for some time, so having a genuine interest in the topic will help to keep you motivated.  If you have any questions specific to your topic or project, you should ask your supervisor, programme director or another member of staff who teaches you.

Planning your dissertation or research project

A research-based dissertation or project is a large piece of work requiring a high level of critical analysis.  To achieve this you will have to allow time, not just for the researching phase, but also for the writing and editing stages.  You will need to give yourself plenty of time to:

• Read around your topic and undertake background research;
• Digest and think about what you are learning and writing;
• Complete experiments, fieldwork, interviews or project placements;
• Analyse data, findings or results, and interpret them;
• Think about and decide on your conclusions.

Taking a project management approach to your dissertation or research project might be a more effective way to successfully complete it.  The Time management page has tips and tools for organising your time.

Time management webpage and tools

The dissertation and project planner can be used to think about the different stages and help give you an overall view of the process.  There are some general points and questions to act as prompts, spaces you can add your own notes in and some useful tips and resources.

Dissertation and project planner (pdf)                     Dissertation and project planner (rtf)

Writing your dissertation

You should not underestimate the time that should be allocated to writing your dissertation.  Writing will involve planning, background research, drafting, redrafting, and proof-reading and editing.

First draft : Your first draft is about getting words on the page.  For example, it may sketch out your first thoughts, arguments and potential structure.  You can review these and use them to check: are you focussed on the right topics and questions?  Is your structure and line of thought sensible?  This is also a good time to set up your format requirements (e.g. page layouts, references).

Redrafts : Redrafting is where you expand and refine your ideas and argument.  You may also find that as you are writing the direction of your argument changes; for example this could be due to your literature research producing new avenues of thought or your experiments turning up unexpected results.  This is a good time to review the focus of your initial question, and whether your arguments or conclusions are still sensible.

Final draft(s) : Your final draft(s) is where you cast a critical eye over your work and assess how effective it is in communicating your argument and conclusions - does it answer the question?  You should also check that your presentation, spelling and grammar are appropriate and polished, all your references are included, and your are following the appropriate format guidance.

It is a good idea to take a break between writing and reviewing your work.  Try to leave at least a day between writing before you pick it up again, the longer the better.  This allows you to look at your work with an analytical eye, looking for ways to improve.  Imagine you are reading your work as someone who is not so familiar with the topic: would a reader be able to follow and understand your argument?  Do your ideas link?  Have you signposted on from one section to the next?  Remember also to look back at your question/title, does your dissertation address it?  Does it follow a logical structure?

To check the flow of your argument or line of reasoning you can test pieces of your text using set criteria.  To help revise and restructure your text you can make a reverse outline.  Both of these techniques are available on our Editing and proofreading page.

Editing and proofreading

Producing a professional document

Information Services provide information and guidance about how to produce a thesis or dissertation using Microsoft Word.

Producing a thesis or dissertation using Microsoft Word (EASE log in required)

Thesis Hub: Producing your thesis or dissertation in Word

Choosing a reference manager

A referencing management tool can help you to collect and organise and your source material to produce a bibliography or reference list.

Referencing and reference management

Data Mindfulness

As part of your research you will produce and use research data in a variety of forms from quantitative and/or qualitative research.  This may be data you generate yourself or obtained from other researchers, data repositories or public records.  You need to make choices about what you use, handle your data correctly and document all of this process.

The University’s Research Data Service helps staff and students be effective with their research data before, during and after their project.   They have created an introductory handbook on Data Mindfulness for taught students writing a dissertation.  This handbook is accompanied by a set of short videos.  Together these cover topics including what data is, how to store it, file organisation and dealing with your data after your hand-in.  There is advice in the handbook on working with sensitive data and issues such as privacy, confidentiality and disclosure.

Data Mindfulness handbook

Data Mindfulness videos

Work-based dissertations

Many courses and programmes, particularly at Postgraduate level, offer the opportunity to carry out a work-based dissertation.  These opportunities vary between Schools and Programmes but will typically involve students tackling a research question identified by an organisation such as a business, a public sector organisation or a charity.  A work based dissertation project can be invaluable for your employability and for career development.

If you are interested in carrying out a work-based dissertation you may need to start planning earlier than you would for a more traditional academic dissertation.  If your Programme offers this opportunity, you will be given this information at the start of Semester 1.  If you would like to source and set up a dissertation project with an external organisation yourself, you will need to speak with your Programme Director or Course Organiser first.

You can draw on resources developed by the Making the Most of Masters project.

Making the Most of Masters

Work-based projects – advice for students

There are a variety of study guides available on dissertation and project writing.  Books aimed at postgraduate students can also be useful for undergraduates.  Our IAD Resource List has a selection available in University libraries.

Study Skills Guides

This article was published on 2024-02-26

HCA Librarian

Blogging on library news, resources, services and skills for staff & students in the school of history, classics and archaeology.

Category Archives: Dissertation Festival

Dissertation festival 2021.

From 8 – 19 March the Library is running an online Dissertation Festival . The events taking place during this two week period will highlight what the Library can do for you to help you succeed with your dissertation.

In this blog post I am going to focus on the sessions that might be of particular interest to dissertation students (undergraduates or postgraduates) in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology (HCA). However, to find all sessions available and to book on take a look at the Dissertation Festival guide . Continue reading →

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Open Content

This guide brings together information about Open Access Resources and Open Educational Resources. It aims to make Open Access resources easier to find and use for study, teaching and research.

Finding open Theses and Dissertations

University of edinburgh and uk theses.

Edinburgh Research Archive - Full text electronic copies of most University of Edinburgh PhD theses can be found online in the Edinburgh Research Archive (ERA). The collection comprises 23,500 items and includes MD theses from the 1700s through to PhDs recently awarded in 2020.

EThoS: e-theses online service - This service from the British Library aims to provide a national aggregated record of all doctoral theses awarded by UK Higher Education institutions, and free access to the full text of as many theses as possible for use by researchers.

Google Scholar Search

If you know the details of the thesis you wish to consult then an effective way to find the full text is via  Google Scholar. Search for the full title in quotes, followed by the author last name, and/or date if known. 

International theses

DART-Europe is a searchable database of electronic research theses held in European repositories. It covers around 586 Universities in 29 European countries.

EBSCO Open Dissertations   is a free database with records for more than 1.4 million electronic theses and dissertations from more than 320 universities around the world. 

Global ETD Search  from the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) contains around 6 million records, the majority of which are open, but some may not be publicly available.

Open Access Theses & Dissertations  currently indexes around 5 million open access theses and dissertations from 1100 institutions worldwide.

Making your thesis open access

Theses and dissertations from the University of Edinburgh are published online in the Edinburgh Research Archive  (ERA). In 2020, UoE theses were downloaded 829,804 times from ERA (source IRUS-UK download report).  The University has an expectation that a PhD thesis is a document available for public consultation. As such, unless a legitimate reason for restricting access to the thesis exists, all PhD theses will be made publicly available on the internet. Masters dissertations are not routinely made available online, but exceptional dissertations can be made open access.

PhD and other doctoral theses

Masters dissertations.

Only Masters Dissertations from the School of Philosophy, Psychology & Language Sciences and the School of Geosciences are routinely deposited in the Edinburgh Research Archive (ERA). If you are from a different School you can make your master dissertation open access by depositing in ERA. You can do this by logging in with your EASE credentials, then selecting your Schools Thesis & Dissertation Collection and follow the prompts for submitting a new item to the collection.

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Library Matters: news from ECA Library

Dissertation festival, autumn dissertation festival: 31 october – 4 november 2022.

Dissertation Festival : Monday 7 March – Friday 18 March 2022

• Do you want to find out more about the library resources available to support your dissertation question?
• Are you interested in learning how to manage the bibliographic and research data you’ve found?

Join us for two weeks of online events and find out what the Library can do for you to help you succeed with your dissertation.

• Make your dissertation something special : find out about our fantastic collections of digital primary sources
• Discover the full range of digital resources that you can access via the University
• Take the first steps to learn new skills in managing your bibliographic references and your research data

Live session times don’t suit you? Dissertation Festival sessions are complemented by the modules in the new LibSmart II online course which can be undertaken at any time to build your knowledge and skills in the library landscape for your dissertation research. For more information, see http://www.ed.ac.uk/is/LibSmart Find out more at : www.ed.ac.uk/is/dissertation-festival

Dissertation Festival 2021: 25th – 29th October

UPDATE: our Dissertation Festival week took place from 25th – 29th October 2021. You can access recordings from the programme of online events at the Dissertation Festival webpage

                Our next Dissertation Festival will take place in March 2022.

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Digital Education Hub

part of the MSc in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh

MSc E-learning Dissertation Festival

Are you aiming to hand in your dissertation for the 31 August deadline? Do you want a chance to talk through your ideas?  Perhaps see how other people are tackling their dissertations?

Well, we thought it would be fun and useful to throw a dissertation festival.  This is a chance for folk handing in soon (or even mid-way and wanting to get some extra input) to share their ideas, issues and inspirations with each other.

The festival idea is in it’s early stages, but we’re imagining it running throughout the week of Monday 8 August .  Festival events would include:

1.   A poster display in Second Life

Posters are a great way to re-imagine your argument and draw out the key points you might want to drive home in your write up.  There’s also a great way of giving folk a handy overview of your work.

So, we think it would be fun to have posters up of each folk’s work.  They can be as creative or ‘elegantly simple’ as you like!  All you have to worry about is creating a jpeg or pdf or the like, we’ll take care of mounting the posters in SL.

To add to the creative spirit, we’d like to try experimenting with haikus describing your topic (check out  http://dissertationhaiku.wordpress.com/   for some great examples)

2.  Synchronous sessions in Second Life and Wimba

Second Life Champage and Q&A :  We’ll start the festival off  with a champagne gathering among our lovely Second Life posters, along with a question & answer session with some of the MSc team staff about the final stages of the dissertation process (though folk just considering the dissertation are welcome, of course!).

There’ll be a mechanism for folk viewing your posters and haikus to leave feedback.  We’ll also have links from the posters to the synch sessions we’re planning – so the posters will be a handy ‘taster’ for your dissertation presentation.

Wimba dissertation presentations: We’ll then run a few sessions in Wimba.  Each session will last about an hour and include 2-3 student presentations (10 minutes of presentation, 10 minutes of discussion).  The presentations will be grouped according to topics.  Again, any students, staff or other interested parties will be welcome to attend and the events would be advertised via the Hub and student email list.

So, do you want to join in?

If you’re about to hand in, or even part-way through and wanting to take advantage of this opportunity, do get in touch with me.   ([email protected])

Let me know your topic, your availability for synch sessions (i.e. preferred UK times and days), and if you are up for creating a poster and haiku.

Also – let me know if you have any other bright ideas for what we could do with the festival idea.

For those who aren’t in the throws of the dissertation – I’ll be emailing/hubbing out closer to the date with dates, times, venues and topics.  Do come along – you’ll get fab insights into the dissertation process, inspiration for your own dissertation and I’ve no doubt you’ll have handy insights for folk tackling this all important part of the MSc.

7 thoughts on “MSc E-learning Dissertation Festival”

This is a great idea – both haikus and posters (not to mention the champagne;-). Although the dissertation is not of immediate urgency for me, I’d love (and hope) to attend! Good luck with preparations.

Fab, thanks Ania! I’ve got a few nibbles already from folk wanting to attend – so hopefully we’ll have a festival’s worth soon! 🙂

Sounds like a fab idea, I’d love to attend.

Hi Clara, I am intending to submit by 31st August, having prevaricated for two years! I’m up in principle for poster, haiku (yikes) and Wimba, but will confirm separately as I’m teaching over the summer ☹ and will need to check diary etc. Jim

would love to join but on holiday during this time – is there anywhere I can visit for after event viewing?

Hi all – thanks for getting back to me (and apologies for the delay in responding, I’m on holidays at the moment!).

Jim – awesomeriffic! Send me an email with dates/times you think you might be able to make a synch session that week. If you can’t do synch, you could always do the poster in SL and see if you can’t get some feedback from others that way.

Ali and Emma – thanks loads for the interest. I’ll post more details in a week or two on how to rock along and get involved. Ali, hopefully I’ll have something further on after event viewing – I’m hoping we can leave the posters/haikus etc up in SL for a week or two after the event.

Hi Clara – I’ve emailed you separately.

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Graduate show set to sparkle at art festival exhibition

A talented group of graduating students have transformed Edinburgh College of Art into a visionary exhibition at this year’s Art Festival.

Magical adventures, identity, sustainable designs and nostalgic comics are some of the themes running through the extraordinary work of more than 350 postgraduate students that will be displayed during a week-long exhibition.

Visitors to the August Graduate Show will be offered a glimpse of a new era of talent, spanning the disciplines of art, design and architecture and landscape architecture.

The August Graduate Show is free to enter and is open to the public from Saturday 17 August - Friday 23 August at the ECA Main Building on Lauriston Place.

Captivating creations

Through colourful paintings and sculptures, Remi Jablecki has taken inspiration from the natural world to explore highly personal themes of hidden identity, belonging and queerness.

The artist charts his experiences through abstract oil paintings of snails, stick insects and weeds, alongside a series of aluminium creatures depicting sprouting potatoes and gherkins.

Maggie Carrol has created a series of whimsical illustrations for a new graphic novel. Sabrina McKay and the Cerulean World tells the magical story of an adventurous 11-year-old girl and her dog, Tomino, living in a village on the north east coast of Scotland in the 1950s.

Elsewhere, Kezia Greenwood has designed a collection of set pieces for a theatre play. The artist’s creations are inspired by the Chimera, a hybrid monster from ancient Greek mythology merging animal and human forms.

Audience interaction

Augmented reality brings childhood nostalgia to life in design and digital media student Lea Fevrier’s creation. Using an immersive, 3D-web experience, visitors can explore the classic comic series, Tintin, through interactive quizzes and stories.

Shun Guo, Yilin Hu, Yunxi Lu and Shuomeng Zhang’s interactive design, Youself, invites visitors to explore self-identity and how this is influenced by social norms by passing through a striking red archway.

Climate conscious

Sustainability is the focus of Brandon LeNoir’s Design for Decomposition. Brandon refashions a lamp out of rice paper-gelatine composite to test a concept that could see biodegradable materials being used in household objects to help reuse certain components once an object is at the end of its lifespan.

The sustainability theme continues with Luowen Kong‘s interesting take on the environmental impact of beef consumption. Through an interactive game-like experience, visitors can use a set of scales to counterbalance cows’ carbon footprint with eco-friendly – and often amusingly impossible – actions.

Thought-provoking perspectives

Inspired by her own experiences, Maryam Haddadi’s documentary film explores the impact of compulsory hijab in Iran, blending personal memories with abstract imagery.

Through extensive research, archival exploration and intimate storytelling, the film captures the emotional and psychological struggle for women's rights.

Yongwei Chen’s sculpture uses a pound sign, roses, diamond jewellery and chocolates to represent each letter in the word “love”. The Measure Of Love, is a comment on how people use material items as a way to prove the strength of their feelings towards others.

August festivals

The August Graduate Show is part of the Edinburgh Art Festival, the UK's largest annual celebration of visual art, which attracts audiences from around the world.

Since its launch in 2004, the Festival has featured exhibitions, events and presentations of visual art from major figures in the arts world, alongside emerging artists and designers.

The Graduate Show Exhibition is a culmination of months of hard work and is an opportunity to celebrate our students’ achievements. Our August show is part of the Edinburgh Art Festival programme and will offer the city’s festival goers with a unique opportunity to discover innovative and inspiring new work from our students. Professor Juan Cruz Edinburgh College of Art Principal

EAF are pleased to work with Edinburgh College of Art to help showcase the incredible work of these graduates. We are committed to supporting young creatives as they begin their careers, and being able to present their designs in a festival setting offers an invaluable opportunity to connect with a broader audience. We wish the graduates every success in their future and look forward to seeing where their talent takes them. Kim McAleese Director of the Edinburgh Art Festival

Related links

ECA August Graduate Show 2024 | Edinburgh College of Art

Image credit - Neil Hanna