External Examining Experience

Yesterday I was the external examiner for a doctorial thesis in LIS. It was about the evaluation of user interface in Persian web-based digital libraries. Being an examiner, is a good opportunity to review all the required features that we usually expect of a thesis. I did my assessment in seven levels including: originality of the topic, links with the literature body, soundness of the methodology, value of the findings, thoroughness of the analysis, applicability of the results, and coherence and consistency of the thesis. While I was reading this thesis, in the past few days, I was thinking about what makes a PhD thesis different from a master dissertation. In summary, I think a doctorial thesis should have all the required characteristics of a master dissertation, along with five main distinctive aspects including: an original topic, a comprehensive and an analytical literature review, a sound and rigorous methodology, a deep and thorough analysis of the collected data, and finally some sorts of contribution to the knowledge.

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