This might be a silly question but why are theses so long (200+ pages)? Someone just told me that they finished their 213 pages-long bachelor’s thesis, but I‘m confused about who the audience would be. Who would spend so much time reading a 213 thesis of a bachelor student? Do people actually read them? What is the purpose of some theses being so long. Also, on a Masters level, does the long length not make important information inaccessible, because it‘s buried deep down in those hundreds of pages?
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They don’t have to be, it just depends on the research topic and the direction of the supervising professor.
For a contrasting reference point, my master’s thesis (Electrical Engineering) was only 16 pages long, and that included a couple of half page graphics and many equations.
There are some topics, especially at masters level, that are just really complicated. So you need a lot of words to really be able to explain it all properly.
A good thesis should be as short as possible whilst still properly communicating what is required. Sometimes that ‘as short as possible’ will still be quite long.
For example, my master’s write up had: an introduction, a background section, a theory section, a methodology section, a results and analysis section, and a conclusion.
Those are all sections that absolutely need to be in there. And each of them required quite a lot of words to properly communicate the necessary information. When you add in a contents page, chapter breaks, references etc etc you’re looking at a lot of pages.
Really, no. The vast majority of theses do not get read. They’re simply a demonstration of a student’s ability to, basically, write a book on their specialty. In theory every student would be creating a new body of meaningful work on a subtly distinct aspect of their field but in practice 99% of them are bad books. Any professional writer will tell you that everybody’s first book is bad though so there’s no shame in it or really any expectation of them to be good.
If you become famous maybe your thesis will be dug up and examined – although we rarely see that, or at least to any notable/newsworthy extent. Some exceptionally good or exceptionally salacious theses might see actual distribution as books. I know a lady who’s mid 00’s thesis about sex on the internet did but even a book like that only sells hundreds of hard copies. Still thought that’s more than most people can say!
Perhaps someday the AIs will get into all of those tens of thousands of 400 page academic works as a Large Language Model. Who knows what it might learn in there. Hope they were adequately peer reviewed! Narf!
Sometimes it has to be that long to contain all the research someone has done.
Sometimes it’s that long because the author doesn’t understand brevity.
The purpose of the thesis is really not primarily about advancing human knowledge and even less about communicating that more effectively. Instead, the thesis provides the student with a structured opportunity to practice a field’s methodological tools with rigor and depth, and to demonstrate to their advisors that they have mastered the methodology and understand the complications and the limitations of the field’s techniques. And that means going into depth on methodological details, complications, and methodological solutions to an extent that isn’t really necessary if you’re trying to efficiently communicate a new finding.
From this perspective, a thesis doesn’t need to generate any new knowledge to be successful, it just needs to give the writer a reason to practice the methodology, and it to show off their skills to advisors. If along the way the thesis really does develop something new and interesting to the field, then it’s not uncommon for the student and their advisors to repackage it into a much more approachable (i.e. shorter) research paper for publication.
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Any thesis is serving two primary purposes: for the student to learn through the process of research and writing, and for their professors to evaluate whether they have shown adequate mastery of the knowledge and techniques of their field. Any audience beyond that very small readership is icing on the cake. In the case of a bachelor’s thesis, the expected number of future readers is 0. Nobody expects an undergraduate to produce genuinely new and interesting work (although once in a long while they may do so). In rare cases, a master’s thesis may be read by one other person (in my forthcoming academic book, out of hundreds of sources, one is a master’s thesis, the only extant prior work on a particular architect). A PhD dissertation is categorically different, and it’s reasonably common for them to be read by dozens, possibly hundreds, of other scholars. A dissertation is also functionally the first draft of a future professor’s first book, in book-based disciplines.
As for length, there could be different reasons, but apart from the obvious ones (the author needed that much space to make their arguments, or else they just got self-indulgent), you’re thinking about it the wrong way. The point of a thesis is not to present new facts that can be distilled into a few sentences, but to make an argument, often a complex one. That can require space. My dissertation was about 100,000 words, spread over six chapters, an intro, and a conclusion. That’s because it’s, as I said, a draft of a book.
In science reports the appendix can be 100’s of pages of lab results, figures, tables, etc. Add on to that figures and photos throughout the report, and 30 pages of writing can quickly become 200 pages of report.
You’re thinking that the end thesis has wide value in itself but in some fields that’s not true. We may take sections and publish them separately in journals, but the final thesis isn’t really designed for a wide audience. It’s a demonstration of effort and skills
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