THE FORMAT OF THE PHD SUMMARY (EMP)

Abstract

The PhD summary in English is an obligatory component of the documentation submitted for the successful completion of the dissertation process. Concerning the PhD summary structure and content, there are no uniform guidelines or assessment criteria and considerable variation is observed at the university level. The present paper reviews the existing practices and aims at providing an outline of its nature, purpose and contents.

A corpus of recently published dissertations at the Medical University of Varna is analysed and compared to open-access resources in various disciplines in the search for a coherent pattern and a framework for structuring the summary. Problems that doctoral students experience in the process of reviewing the scientific text, extracting vital information and presenting significant facts in English are investigated at text organization level. Additionally, the linguistic analysis focuses on the keywords and the descriptive language used to highlight the novelty of the research question.

The composition of an independent text that makes a strong statement requires a good analytic approach, adequate interpretation of the results and the overall conclusions of the research. The key role of the thesis summary in English further emphasizes the importance of the scientific language skills of international researchers.