Dissertation Help - How to source and collate dissertation material

Beginning to source dissertation material

Sourcing and collating dissertation material is a crucial part of constructing your dissertation and will play a major part throughout. The sources you use will not only establish the textual validity of your dissertation but also emphasise that your dissertation is truly original, the cornerstone of all research leading to the award of a higher degree.

The first thing you should do when sourcing dissertation material is to find out what the referencing style used by your university or college is. This is essential as from the moment you begin to source dissertation material you should list the author, title and publication details.

There are two reasons for doing this which make it essential and which will make correct sourcing of dissertation material more effective and efficient:
• You will be organizing your sources so that your bibliography evolves as your research does
• You will avoid any possibility of accidental plagiarism.

If you reference your work even in your notes in the correct referencing style, you will find it will become second nature and not a task that you have to learn laboriously at the end of your dissertation.

Finding dissertation material

Begin by looking at the established texts on the topic of your dissertation. These will be sources that are accepted as fundamental texts which will be well-known as sources in the area you are researching. Any academic library will have access to such texts or will order them for you (librarians are often an excellent source of help in this area and others, so it might be worth making an appointment with the chief librarian at your college or university to chat about your dissertation).

Once you have made full use of these as sources of dissertation material in themselves, you can make use of them in other ways. Every published text must provide a full list of sources used in the index and/or acknowledgements. You can adopt these as a ‘jumping off point’ for your own research. This is not cheating nor plagiarism, as you will notice that most texts in a given subject have ‘shared sources’ which are to some extent generic.
By using the bibliographies of established academics, you can be sure that the sources you are accessing as dissertation material are valid and relevant as well as having an established integrity. You will be amazed how much material you will amass simply by using these bibliographies, as they will have been well-researched previously be experts in the field to which you are attempting to contribute.

Additional sources of dissertation material

The keynote of any research must be originality and therefore you should ensure that your dissertation material is as contemporary as possible. This means checking journals and electronic sources right up until the last moment before you submit your final draft of your dissertation to ensure that no-one else has pre-empted your research and compromised its originality, which would be disastrous.

Whilst the more important journals in individual disciplines should always be your first port of call in sourcing dissertation material, such as the BMJ in Medicine, for example, you should also investigate less well-known journals, as long as these are regarded as reliable, because often getting published is very difficult for new writers and the newest research might be found not in the major publications but in the smaller ones. The same is true of the internet for sourcing dissertation material. Generally speaking, you can be more readily published on the internet than in conventional ‘paper publishing’ so you will find more ‘experimental’ sources on the internet. This has disadvantages as well of course, as the internet is not as editorially sound as paper publications and you should always verify any information sourced on the internet and elsewhere (ensure that all your sources are properly referenced, as there are different ways of referencing journals and electronic sources). Remember that most well-established journals now have an online version now, too.

This type of secondary sourcing can be useful to you in finding dissertation material in the same way that texts are. As with books, authors of articles in journals or on the internet have to attribute all sources they cite. By following up the sources used by these additional authors, you will access yet another source for locating and collating your own dissertation material.

Advice on collating dissertation material

Some of this has already been covered, for example referencing correctly from the first, but there are a few tips for organising dissertation material that may be of use to you:

  • As you begin to collect material, arrange the sources in terms of relevance, establishing a list of primary and secondary sources using an effective method of categorization.
  • Make lists of quotations that will be useful in different chapters of your work, remembering to cite them correctly even in notes. These can be colour-coded, or marked in any way you feel is appropriate to make it easy to reference and cross-reference your citations later.
  • Sub-divide your bibliography into primary and secondary sources and/or biographies, critical works etc.
  • Ensure that every work consulted appears in your bibliography and every work cited appears in your reference list.


All of these means of collating material should help you to organize your dissertation material more effectively. If you are efficient in the collation of your material you are more likely to produce an organized and effective dissertation.

A final thought

If you are fortunate enough to have access to manuscripts, letters or other original documents housed in museums or private collections, make full – and careful – use of them and remember to thank the keepers of these precious items in the preface to your dissertation. Remember that at every stage, originality in your own work is primary and it can have no better source than the original texts themselves, so these are the best dissertation materials of all and should be taken as absolutely pre-eminent if you are able to use them as dissertation material.

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