Hi everyone

I'm new to the forum but hope you don't mind providing me with some much needed advice!
I'm in the last year of my Psychology PhD (my 4th write-up year) and I'm hoping to complete my thesis by January. Feeling very bogged down with my write-up just now and can't get my head around what the thesis is actually going to end up looking like.
I've done 3 studies (one with patients, one with health professionals and a follow-up study of the patients 1 year later) and I'm considering splitting my thesis into 3 - with general introduction chapter, then intro, method, results, discussion for each study and a final general conclusions chapter (total 5 chapters). Do you reckon this sounds ok??

Also my uni says the PhD word limit is 80,000 excluding ancillary data ... what does this mean?? I'm guessing it means excluding the appendices but what about references? Are these usually included in word count?

Any advice would be really appreciated!

Bubs
xoxox

You should double check the rules with your university authorities to be sure. At my university footnotes/endnotes are included in the total word count, but not the final bibliography or any appendices.