I know - when I think back to my Masters, using data that were already 'out there' and that I knew I could get - I had no idea at the time how cushy things were!

In my field, some people do systematic literature reviews while others do more narrative-type reviews, where the focus is more on giving a sort of guided tour of the major works and themes. I'm doing the latter type, but if yours is going to be a systematic review, I would recommend looking for published papers with that type of review, to see the sort of detail they give - in my topic there are quite a few of these reviews published, and they tend to set out things like which databases and keywords were used, how they sorted through the abstracts looking for appropriate papers, how many papers they started and ended up with, and so on.

Hi Tudor, I won't describe myself as someone who has completely successfully caught up (since I'm at the end of my funded period with a good couple of months' work still to do!), but I have definitely had the experience of changing my project in second year - in my case it was necessary to alter my direction and focus due to recruitment nightmares. The advice I would give would be to write things as you go (not necessarily chapters, but maybe chunks of writing that can be re-purposed later on, or at least make really good records of your readings and thoughts). As Jay said, it's likely that you will still be tweaking research questions/readings etc in the light of your data collection, but start thinking early on about what your thesis might look like and start thinking in terms of it being a thesis.

Hi Babygirl, this situation is not going away, is it? Despite all your efforts to manage things, you keep coming back to the same unhappy place. I don't always deal with things head-on (eg I was in a workplace bullying situation some years ago) and I can tell you that looking back, I am sorry I wasted so much of my own time and emotional energy trying to contain someone else's abusive rubbish. For the sake of yourself and your PhD, I do think you need to get into a more comfortable and professional supervisory relationship, so I would echo the advice of others here - please speak to someone at your uni for advice about how to resolve this. You may find that as soon as you open up, you feel less alone with it and have options.

Yeah, I've been giving them a guide to when I'll have submitted as well. I think they must be getting lots of applicants who already have their PhDs.

Zutterfly, I have not managed to get shortlisted for anything yet, and I also have a lot of experience of getting jobs outside of academia. It is so demoralising, and especially at this stage when the pressure is on to get something! One of the jobs I applied for needed only an undergraduate degree, and the topic was an area in which I have 12 years of work experience. Hugh may be right that academic employers know what the final pre-submission stages are like and won't interview us at this stage. I have to say, I was open-minded about whether or not I wanted to even go for academic jobs, and I am going to draw a line under this type of experience pretty quickly and move on to something different. I hope you get helpful feedback from your uni - it would be interesting to hear it if you're able to share anything, as all I've had so far is emails saying 'we got lots of excellent applications and cannot provide further feedback'.

Wow, it must be something about epistemology sections! At my last annual review, one of the reviewers questioned my whole chapter that includes epistemology, as he said it doesn't relate 'directly to the data'. However, I'm leaving the chapter in for now, as I think the issue might have been having quants reviewers for a mainly qualitative thesis, and I have heard that other qualitative people have been strongly encouraged to include reflective pieces on epistemology and so on. Feels like a huge gamble going against the advice of reviewers though, and I will be gutted too if the end result is that I need to lose this work!

Just to add to my answer: I think it's common practice to note in the thesis something like, 'Parts of this chapter have previously been published in journal XYZ', but I'm sure what you're describing is not self-plagiarism. The fact that you can do a 'thesis by publication' says it's not!

Hugh, this sounds like wrong advice to me, and it contradicts everything I have been told to do (ie I've been told to lift things word for word from my thesis and publish them). If I find anything concrete about this I will share it with you, but I'd put money on it that it's the wrong advice.

Ah, I see! I haven't heard of any name for that section of the thesis, sorry. Maybe just the roman numerals would do, since it's mostly short, standalone things of one or two pages?

Is it for the contents list, Hugh? I think I would just list each of these things separately under Abstract and so on.

Well done, litphdgirl! And thanks, tuutikki - definitely hoping that second wind arrives soon :)

I did my MSc with the OU, if there's anything I can help with?