Subject Guides: Education & Organizational Leadership: Dissertation Writing

Dissertation Template

The following templates were created to adhere to all dissertation formatting requirements (margins, preliminary pagination, table of contents, etc.) required by the Ed.D. in Organization Leadership program. There are two versions; please choose your template based on the type of research you are doing:

Qualitative Dissertation Template

Quantitative Dissertation Template

(Note that the headings modeled in these templates should be considered as starting points, not as definitive requirements. Please adjust the headings to suit the needs of your dissertation project.)

For more information on using the templates--including how to create new headings, update the table of contents, and paste in text from another document--please view this video:

Tutorial for Using the Dissertation Template

Finally, you can reference the following checklist to ensure that you are using the template correctly:

Dissertation Template Checklist

Literature Review Tutorials

Literature Reviews: An Overview for Students
What is a literature review? What purpose does it serve in research? What should you expect when writing one? Find out here in this guide from NCSU libraries.
Write a Lit Review from Virginia Commonwealth University
Follow this guide to learn how to write a literature review, beginning with a synthesis matrix.
Literature Review: The What, Why and How-to Guide
This guide will help you understand what is a Literature Review, why it is important and how it is done. Also includes information on Annotated Bibliographies.
Writing a Literature Review from the University of Toledo
Covers what a lit review is, lit review types, writing a lit review and further readings.
The Literature Review Process
A guide from the University of North Texas on selecting a topic, searching the literature, plan before reviewing, reviewing the literature and writing the review.
The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Permission granted to use this guide.

Literature Review

Literature Review Table
Writing a literature review is one of those tasks in which a small investment in organization up front has large payoffs later. The point of a literature review is to integrate and evaluate a substantial number of different pieces, so any strategy that facilitates keeping track of all of them is useful. Two common strategies are tables and annotated bibliographies; those who are visual learners/ thinkers often prefer the former, and those with strong textual orientations prefer the latter, but some people do both, and a small fraction uses neither. (Empirical Research and Writing: A Political Science Student's Practical Guide)

Literature Mapping Tools

Connected Papers
Get a visual overview of a new academic field
Enter a typical paper and we'll build you a graph of similar papers in the field. Explore and build more graphs for interesting papers that you find - soon you'll have a real, visual understanding of the trends, popular works and dynamics of the field you're interested in.
Open Knowledge Maps
Type in a few broad keywords related to your topic. Open Knowledge Maps will retrieve the. 100 most relevant papers for this topic and group them according to theme. Each theme contains the papers that were identified.
Citation Gecko
Citation Gecko uses a set of 'seed papers' and uses citations to connect these papers to other relevant literature. Input a set of papers you have identified on your topic. Explore connections chronologically or in a nexus.