Dissertation Guidelines
[taken from the Ph.D. Handbook]

Research Committee

After admission to candidacy, your next step is to assemble a Research Committee whose members will assume responsibility for guiding you through the dissertation process and conducting the oral defense of the dissertation. Your Research Committee must have at least four members, three of whom must be from SLIS and one from your minor area. At least one member of the committee should have particular expertise in the research method(s) you plan to use in your research. All members of your Ph.D. Research Committee must be members of the University Graduate School faculty and at least half of the Research Committee must be full members of the graduate faculty.

The committee chair must be a full-time member of the SLIS faculty. It is usual for the committee chair to serve as the dissertation director; however, it is acceptable for another committee member with particular expertise in your research area to direct the dissertation. Specifically, the committee chair and the dissertation director (if other than the chair) must be full members of the graduate faculty. If an associate or affiliate member of the graduate faculty has special expertise in the area of your research, the research committee chair and the Director of the Doctoral Program may petition UGS to allow that faculty member to direct your dissertation.

In some cases, it is possible to include a committee member who is not a member of the Indiana University faculty. To receive approval for such a substitution, two conditions must be met: The external member must have special expertise, either in the major area of study or in the research methodology, that is not available among the members of the graduate faculty; and the external member must have a strong, documented history of research.

The members of your Research Committee must be approved by the University Graduate School at least six months before the final defense of the dissertation. The UGS form for Nomination of Research Committee for the Ph.D. is available.

Selecting a Research Committee

The procedure for selecting the members of the Research Committee varies from student to student. Ideally, by this point in the program you will have formed a mentoring relationship with one or more SLIS faculty. Frequently, it is the chair of your Advisory Committee who is your strongest mentor and you may ask him/her to serve as the chair of your Research Committee. In such a case, you and your chair may already have discussed tentative areas of dissertation research prior to your admission to candidacy and prior to the selection of the other members of the Research Committee.

You are not required to ask the chair of your Advisory Committee to chair the Research Committee; and no faculty member is obliged to chair the Research Committee of any doctoral student. Ultimately, the choice of a chair will involve a combination of compatible research interests and compatible personalities; and your experience in S702, S703 and S710 should provide you with insight into shared interests and relevant research expertise of SLIS faculty.

Dissertation Prospectus

A one or two page dissertation prospectus must be submitted with your Nomination of Research Committee for the Ph.D. This prospectus should include a clear statement of the questions to be addressed in your research, an outline of the design of the research, the research methods to be used, and a discussion of the contributions of the research to the advancement of scholarship in the field. The prospectus plays an important role in selection of your Research Committee because it allows prospective members to determine whether they are comfortable serving on your Research Committee. It is unwise to ask a faculty member to commit to serve on your research committee before providing him/her with a written prospectus.

Dissertation Proposal

You are required to develop, submit and defend a dissertation proposal.

Your dissertation proposal will be more detailed than the prospectus and must contain sufficient detail to allow a reader to ascertain your research intentions unambiguously. The proposal normally contains the following elements: a statement of purpose; supporting rationale for the proposed research; literature review and theoretical framework; research questions; proposed procedures, sources of data and methods of data collection; methods of data analysis; and a statement regarding the significance of the research.

S790 Seminar in Doctoral Research is a required course and provides the structure within which to develop your dissertation proposal. It should be taken in the semester immediately following completion of the qualifying exam. If other students are also enrolled in S790, it will meet regularly as a seminar; if you are the only student in the course, S790 will be conducted as an independent study. In either case, you will have an opportunity to work on the proposal under the guidance of the course instructor and with regular input from the chair of your Research Committee. In a paced manner, you will compose and revise each section of your proposal until your chair determines that a satisfactory first draft is ready for submission to the other members of your Research Committee. You will not receive a letter grade in S790 until such times as you have successfully defended your proposal. If the process extends beyond the semester in which you register for S790, a deferred grade (R) will be assigned.

You must provide copies of the dissertation proposal to all members of your Research Committee for comment and guidance and you should convene meetings of the committee as needed. Using written critiques of the proposal from the other committee members, the chair of your Research Committee will determine when your proposal is sufficiently developed to schedule the defense.

Dissertation Proposal Defense

The dissertation proposal is one of the most important milestones in your course of studies. It represents a statement on your part of your intended dissertation research, and its successful defense is an indication that the proposed research is likely to meet the standards of the field. The defended proposal is also a form of contract between you and your Research Committee regarding the work you will submit in your dissertation. To this end, the proposal defense is more critical in nature than the dissertation defense.

With the help of the SLIS Ph.D. Recorder, you will be responsible for scheduling the proposal defense. You must prepare an abstract of the proposal. At least two weeks prior to the scheduled defense date, you will provide SLIS faculty and doctoral students with an announcement of the defense that includes the abstract and information about the date, time and location of the defense. The full proposal should also be made available in electronic format.

You must defend the proposal before your Research Committee and any other faculty and doctoral students who elect to attend. Unlike the qualifying examination, the defense outcome is determined exclusively by the members of your Research Committee.

Use of Human Subjects

Indiana University's Office of Research Compliance is responsible for ensuring that all research on University campuses is conducted in a responsible manner and adheres to federal and state laws as well as University policies (see http://research.indiana.edu/rschcomp/over.html).

All research involving human subjects must be approved by the institutional review board (IRB) on the appropriate University campus before recruitment of subjects or data collection can begin. On the Bloomington campus, the Human Subjects Committee (HSC) must review and approve all research projects involving human subjects. If your research involves the use of human subjects, you must submit to the HSC a form requesting review and approval of a research protocol involving human subjects. The HSC website is available at http://research.indiana.edu/rschcomp/hmpg.html and provides access to application forms as well as definitions of terms, sample consent forms, and other information that will be of help to you in the application process.

In addition, you must provide documentation that you have successfully passed the Protection of Human Research Participants Certification Test. The test is available at https://www.indiana.edu/~rcr/. The Office of Research Compliance provides two web-based tutorials that meet Federal requirements for human subjects research: one for biomedical research and one for non-biomedical research. These tutorials are available at http://www.indiana.edu/~rcr/index.php. Because of the broad coverage of the human research certification test, you should plan to review both tutorials before taking the test.

Dissertation Manuscript

Formatting of the dissertation manuscript is specified in A Guide to the Preparation of Theses and Dissertations. This guide is published by UGS and is available electronically at http://www.graduate.indiana.edu/preparing-theses-and-dissertations.php.

The guide contains detailed instructions for the preparation and submission of the dissertation manuscript in both traditional and electronic methods. Two copies of the completed dissertation are requested by UGS, one bound and one unbound. You should also provide both SLIS and the chair of your Research Committee with a bound copy of the completed dissertation. Although it is not required, doctoral candidates often present the other members of the Research Committee with a bound copy of the dissertation as a courtesy.

There are advantages to submitting the dissertation electronically, including savings on binding costs, remote submission, and the ability to use color, manipulate the structure and include images and/or audio files. UGS can help with the process if revisions of margins, etc., are needed to meet standards. Once submitted, it will take about a month for the library to make it available online. In addition to the UGS .Guide to the Preparation of Theses and Dissertations, instructions for electronic submission and resources to answer many of your questions are available.

All students entering the SLIS Doctoral Program in Fall 2005 or thereafter will be required to submit the dissertation electronically.

Final Oral Defense

After completion of the dissertation manuscript, an oral examination is scheduled for defense of the dissertation research. This is a public defense open to anyone who wishes to attend. The defense may not be scheduled less than six months after the date on which your Research Committee was approved. Committee members must receive a clean copy of the dissertation manuscript at least four weeks prior to the defense.

You should prepare a summary of the dissertation for approval by your chair. The dissertation defense announcement will include this summary and must be submitted to the University Graduate School at least one month before the date of the final defense.

The University Graduate School awards Ph.D. degrees on the last day of each month. Final copies of the dissertation must be submitted 30 days prior to degree conferral. Since there are often editing changes after the final defense, degree conferral is typically more than 30 days after the dissertation defense.