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If you need to prove the module results you’ve achieved so far, all you need to do is access your Record of Agreed Results (ROAR) letter which you can download yourself from Gradintelligence . This document will show your ratified results for your completed modules so far in your course and shows King’s and ECTS credits. You can  view an example of this letter  online. I’m not sure how to log into my Gradintelligence account We run a process every month which invites any newly enrolled undergraduate or postgraduate taught student to register for a Higher Education Achievement Report (HEAR) on Gradintelligence. Your ROAR and HEAR are generated together and both are available on Gradintelligence. Once you have registered, you will be able to see all of the modules that you are undertaking and results. Important to know: Please check your King's email account for information about registering for your HEAR. To download your Record of Agreed Results (ROAR):

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Related Articles (5)

Dismayed but Forgiving of MLK’s Plagiarism

I am on record as stating that Dr. Martin Luther King is not the only hero of the civil rights movement . King did not do it by himself—indeed, the process began long before he was born—but he deserves a lot of credit. I admire and respect him for multiple reasons. A man of courage and vision, he was a true leader. I wish I had been among the 1,200 people present when he spoke at the University of Texas on March 9, 1962 (after the Montgomery bus boycott and before his showdown with Bull Connor in Birmingham ), but I would not reach Austin until 1971.

Regardless of my high esteem for King, I know he was no angel. This is not because he was a world-class adulterer; such information comes largely from wiretaps conducted by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI , for which Attorney General Robert Kennedy gave approval.  No, the issue is a bugaboo that has wrecked many an academic career: plagiarism.

When Boozer was informed in 1988 that much of his dissertation had been copied, he was stunned but not really upset. A careful academic who put a high value on scholarship, he hoped the issue would just go away.  Boozer was a native of Alabama and supporter of the civil rights movement, and thought of MLK as a friend and colleague. His wife said he was willing to dismiss it as a minor matter, nothing more than King’s failure to use footnotes.

King’s dissertation was not revoked, as happened with many other scholars who had been caught cheating. Instead, in 1991 a letter was placed in the file holding it in the BU library—barely even a slap on the wrist. It emphasized that King’s dissertation, faulty though it was, made a valuable contribution to academe. His reputation at Boston University was unsullied. A plaque adorns a house King lived in during his student days, and there are symposia, professorships (the Martin Luther King Chair in Social Ethics, for example) and honors galore. BU fully embraces this distinguished alumnus.

Simply put, King was wrong to borrow/steal from Boozer in 1955. He was a sloppy academic, and of that there can be no doubt. But it is a relatively—note that modifier—unimportant issue in light of his life’s work. King, whose great-grandfather was a slave preacher, has been called with good reason the most outstanding theologian America has ever produced. When his house was bombed by segregationists soon after the Montgomery bus boycott , angry supporters gathered and called for a response in kind. The good reverend, arrested 20 times and assaulted four times in his career, calmed them by quoting Jesus: “Love your enemies, bless those who curse you and pray for those who spitefully use you”; his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize was well deserved. What King did in leading the civil rights movement is such that his shortcomings as a grad student and his sexual escapades can be forgiven. It’s not that he had feet of clay, but he was human like the rest of us.

About Richard

16 comments.

I believe…that’s another repetitious phase I attribute to the MLK era and even to the man himself. Whether he actually said it or I just think that he said it, is not pertinent to the fact that his speeches made America believe that we in fact just love our neighbor. What a leader in his message proclaimed. You have brought forth good info about his message lived and it is sad to know that he plagiarized portions of his doctorate. I am prone to forgive him since I know that I too have failed, yet my great desire is to inspire others to greatness, to oneness, to brotherly love and he was gifted and good at it. Thanks for the article. I

King stole far more than two-word phrases, but your point is valid. I hope I made clear that he is deserving of forgiveness for this lapse in judgement during his days as a grad student (although, as indicated, he kept doing it and doing it).

I know there’s another side about the Martin Ruther king. I enjoyed reading an interesting essay about other issues behind altruism. As a graduate student, I realize how long my work will keep stored.! Right before the coms exam, thank you for delivering a good message.!

Yes, even the greatest among us (such as King) are not perfect.

Richard-That was very interesting. I heard about his plagiarism, probably back when it made the news. He was a great but flawed man. This reminded me of Joe Biden’s plagiarism (of Neil Kinnock) which caused him to drop out of the 1988 presidential race.

Great but flawed–you said it well, Kevin.

I read your article on Dr. Kim. Excellent discovery and investigation. Shame on Dr. King. His doctgoral degree must have revalued and reconsidered. He should have apologied for his stealing somebody’s thesis. Great discovery and reevaluations on Dr. King, Yong Yoon

Thank you, Mr. Yoon. I do believe we have to be honest about people, even great ones like King. He knew he was not perfect. In some of his speeches and sermons, he talked about himself as a “sinner.”

I am amazed. Universities, in my experience are very rigid when it comes to academic ethics. What happened in the case of MR King raises the opposite issue of racial bias, almost worse in that they were patronizing him by forgiving these things. At this very moment, people are tearing down icons of figures of history because despite their positive accomplishments in life, they had a period that resulted in darker consequences. If you are going to apply this standard, you apply it equally. I revoke your doctorate , sir if no one else will.

To say BU gave him a pass is a huge understatement. And I have gotten a lot of slack for writing this piece, as if I slandered Dr. King.

Thank you for this article. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was great. I think of him as well read. I also think of the oral tradition from cultures that did not have access to education like most academics do. Many black preachers in American history could not read. They could, however, repeat what they heard – and very powerfully. Academics could call Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. flawed, but it’s flawed by whose standards? I call him great for using his gifts – and his entire life – to make this world a better place.

And, yes, I do believe in flawed leaders. I am Lutheran. We are simultaneously saints and sinners. “simul justus et peccator” (Was it Martin Luther who first said that?)

I came across this article looking for who he got the sermon “love your enemies” from, so I could mention it in my sermon. 🙂 I appreciate the author understands the difference between academic papers and preaching. I plagiarize Jesus and the Bible all the time when I preach!

Academic plagiarism cannot be condoned, no way, no how.

Dear Mr. Pennington:

“Academic plagiarism cannot be condoned, no way, no how.”

Trouble is, that’s exactly what Boston U has done. ‘Note in the file’ = slap on the wrist. Had this dissertation been signed Gregory Koster—or even Michael Pennington—, the degree would have been revoked, any academic career wrecked, and figuratively speaking, we’d be soaring into the sky, with a size 12 bootprint on the rump.

The argument that King’s later work is of such value that the dissertation must be ‘quarantined’ is the same argument Henry VIII of England could have made, in breaking away from the Catholic church:

“If you, the Pope don’t give me a pass on marrying the woman I (at this moment) want, I’ll have to secede from the church and set up my own. Otherwise, I won’t be able to sire a heir, and when I die, a civil war may break out. So for the good of the nation, I must be allowed to fool around as I please.”

Today, no one would buy that casuistical argument. Why? Not because it is wrong, and corrupting to the figurative rule of law. It won’t be bought because Henry VIII is not a member of an approved victim group. But Martin King is, and he gets a pass, not least because those who have to power to settle obloquy on him, e.g. Boston University, would suffer immensely from the flareback.

Learning about King’s plagiarism was and is, disillusioning. Had his plagiarism been revealed before his death, it would have damaged the work he was trying to do, depending on when it was revealed. I am obliged for your article, which showed me MLK continued to steal the ideas and words of others. Bring on the disillusionment again! But if the scholarly King was a fraud, deserving of contempt, the preacher and activist were and are magnificent, showing action and conduct worthy of the highest praise. It is not wise to demand perfection, even of an ideal. King’s degree should be revoked. Even with the furor this would generate, King would still be worthy of what was said about Sir Christopher Wren, architect of 1600s London:

If you would see his memorial, look around you.

Many thanks for looking at this late contribution.

Gregory, thank you so very much for reading and making such comments. I agree with them all. I mentioned in one of my replies above that I have gotten a lot of flak (misspelled “slack”) for having written this article. I lost one friendship, which I think is absurd. This former friend was shocked that I would dare say a non-flattering word about the sainted King. Well, sorry, I told the former friend. I tell the truth and let the chips fall.

Blacks will generally don’t care that he plagiarized. This issue has been hidden for a long time, and it is because he is a black icon. And blacks view any critique of a black icon as racism. And many liberal whites will not cover the story, as they don’t want to get accused of racism.

Correct, but you merely restated what I said in the article.

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Centre for Doctoral Studies

Equipping doctoral research students at King's College London to excel

• PGR Community
• Meet the January 2024 winners of the King’s Outstanding Thesis Prize!

Congratulations to the first round of winners of the 23/24 King’s Outstanding Thesis Prize!

Each year a limited number of awards are given to celebrate truly outstanding research and theses completed by King’s doctoral students. The prizes are nominated by the external examiners and are judged by a panel consisting of the College’s Director of Research Talent and the Chair of the Research Degrees Examinations Board. There are two rounds, in January and June, and these are the winners from the first round in January 2024.

Faculty of Life Sciences and Medicine

Dr Alice Beardmore-Gray

If you would like to find out more about Alice’s continuing research then you can find her on Twitter: @alicebgray

Dr Michelle Gibbs

After completing my BSc, MSc, PGDip, and MRes, I knew I wanted to pursue a PhD and developed my research ideas while I was working as a Dietitian in clinical practice in the NHS. My professional interests in malnutrition and oral nutritional support led me to ask key questions about how, why, for whom, and to what extent dietetic consultations worked, how they were experienced by nutritionally vulnerable older adults and other key stakeholders and how their value was perceived. These questions led me to use a convergent parallel mixed method approach to develop a novel programme theory for dietetic consultations that explained their underlying causal mechanisms, contextual influences and how they worked to generate outcomes, as well as understand how oral nutritional support consultations were experienced by older adult patients, their carers and the consulting dietitians, in various clinical contexts.

Since finishing my PhD, I’ve been putting my research knowledge and skills to good use in my current NHS role. I also continue to support student dietitian training at KCL. I am grateful for the opportunity to advance my clinical academic career in dietetics, with exciting post-doctoral plans to advance the body of work I began during my PhD. Further to this, I am engaged in various forms of dissemination at both local and international levels. Overall, I am grateful to be able to do purposeful work, both within and beyond academia, that contributes to improving the lives of others.

If you’d like to see more about Michelle’s current research you can follow her on Twitter here: @drmichellegibbs 

Dr Mathieu Ruthven

Prior to starting a PhD, I worked as a medical physicist specialised in magnetic resonance (MR) imaging at Barts Health NHS Trust. As a health and care professional, I was eligible to apply for a HEE-NIHR Doctoral Clinical and Practitioner Academic Fellowship which enabled me to undertake a PhD while continuing my professional practice and development. My PhD was clinically focused and multidisciplinary, at the interface of MR imaging, artificial intelligence (AI) and clinical assessment of speech. Its ultimate goal was to improve the clinical management and treatment of patients with velopharyngeal insufficiency. The main contributions of my PhD towards this goal were the development of AI-based methods to automatically extract clinically relevant information from MR images of the vocal tract, and creating and making publicly available a dataset to enable others to develop similar methods. More information about the methods and dataset is available in the following journal articles: Ruthven et al. (2021) , Ruthven et al. (2023a) , Ruthven et al. (2023b) .

The outputs of my PhD laid some of the foundations for a successful research funding grant application to Barts Charity. This funding has enabled further research to refine and extend the techniques and bring them closer to clinical translation.

If you would like to find out more about Mathieu’s research you can find him on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthieu-ruthven/

Dr Maria Ibrahim

I am honoured to have received this Outstanding Thesis Prize from King’s. My PhD looked at deceased donor kidney transplantation in the UK. I examined how organs from deceased donors with perceived higher risk characteristics were utilised by UK transplant clinicians, and subsequent patient outcomes using UK transplant registry data. Globally, this is an important issue, as deceased donors become older, with more co-morbidities, thus posing a risk of poor long-term outcomes to potential recipients.

I am a nephrologist by training, and though this gave me an insight into the clinical application of my work, I learnt statistical skills and coding in order to analyse data from the NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT) registry.

My thesis has resulted in three first author publications (PMID  31758833 ,  32690721 , and  36706063 ) and I was able to contribute to a further five papers (PMID 36066902 ,  35185366 ,  33870619 ,  33756062 , and  34514110 ).

During the course of my PhD, I was able to identify that many perceptions around ‘higher risk’ organs are inaccurate, thus encouraging the broadening of the deceased donor pool and better outcomes for patients awaiting a transplant. I helped develop  transplant outcome prediction tools , used extensively by UK transplant clinicians to support patient decision-making.

I have received the support of many individuals throughout the course of my thesis and am especially grateful to my examiners for their nomination, to the statistics and clinical studies team at NHSBT for their continual guidance, and to my supervisors Chris Callaghan, John Forsythe and Rachel Johnson for their unwavering faith in me.

Following my research time I am back to full time clinical work but hope to use the skills I have developed to pursue dual clinical and academic roles in the future.

Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience

Dr Johanna Keeler

Prior to my time at KCL, I studied Psychology (Bsc, University of Exeter). Prior to that, my first job as an 18-year-old was working as a support worker in neurosurgical theatres, which sparked my interest in the workings of the brain and particularly in neuropsychology. My interests in neurobiology were further cemented during my undergraduate studies where I was fortunate to undertake some fantastic research placements that utilised methods and study designs including MRI, neuropsychology, and service evaluation/improvement work. Here I also co-founded an eating disorders peer support group for students. The experiences I had progressed my interests in the mind-body interface, translational research, and lived/living experience involvement, which had a huge influence on my PhD project.

My PhD thesis integrated several methodologies such as structural MRI, neuropsychology, investigations of inflammatory markers and growth factors, and qualitative methods, to examine brain changes in anorexia nervosa. A highlight of my research was translating basic research findings to the lived experience using qualitative methodology. I have disseminated these findings through delivering NHS training to a wide range of clinicians and am hoping to develop some psychoeducational resources for service users, clinicians and carers of people with eating disorders.

Several of the studies I conducted throughout my PhD were part of the groundwork that supported a grant application for a randomised controlled trial looking at the potential of oral ketamine to alleviate depressive symptoms in people with AN and treatment-resistant depression. We recently received funding for this project from the Medical Research Council, and I am currently employed as a postdoc at KCL to prepare the study which is scheduled to start in 2025.

You can find more about Johanna’s current research via her Twitter ( @jhnnklr ) or that of her team ( @kingsedresearch ) or via her research gate ( https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Johanna-Keeler ) or Pure profiles ( https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/johanna-keeler ).

Dr Laura Sichlinger

Prior to pursuing my PhD, I completed an MSc in Neuroscience at KCL and a BA in Phonetics and Speech Processing at the University of Munich. These experiences laid the groundwork for my passion for neuroscience and brain disorders.

Currently, I am privileged to be a member of the Heller lab (lead by Prof Elizabeth Heller) at the University of Pennsylvania and the ENDD team at the Children’s hospital of Philadelphia, where we are dedicated to advancing gene-targeted therapies for rare neurodevelopmental disorders such as STXBP1 and SYNGAP1-related intellectual disability.

Beyond my research, I am committed to fostering inclusivity and equality in STEM. During my PhD I had the honour to be co-president of Women of the Wohl, a student-led equality network, advocating for the rights of womxn and marginalised groups in the scientific community. I believe that diversity is not only essential for scientific progress but also enriches the fabric of our society.

If you want to see more about Laura’s current research then you can find her on Twitter via @LSichlinger

Faculty of Law

Dr Farnush Ghadery

If you’d like to find out more about Farnush’s current research then please check out her LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/farnush-ghadery/

Faculty of Natural, Mechanical and Engineering Sciences

Dr Gergely Bodo

I feel honoured to have received the King’s Outstanding Thesis Prize for my research on Stochastic Analysis for Cylindrical Lévy Processes. This accomplishment would not have been possible without the exceptional guidance and support from my supervisor, Markus Riedle (Department of Mathematics).

Moreover, I am immensely grateful to my thesis examiners, Rama Cont (University of Oxford) and Stefan Geiss (University of Jyväskylä), not only for nominating me for this award, but also for showing a genuine interest in my research by providing insightful suggestions on possible directions for future work. Their mathematical expertise and careful reading of my thesis led to a rather stimulating discussion during my defence.

In my thesis, together with Professor Riedle, we laid down the theoretical foundations necessary for the successful application of cylindrical Lévy processes as models of random perturbations of infinite-dimensional systems. By developing a comprehensive theory of stochastic integration with respect to cylindrical Lévy processes, our work allowed for the generalisation of fundamental tools in stochastic analysis such as Itô’s formula or the stochastic dominated convergence theorem. These results paved the way for the consideration of stochastic evolution equations driven by cylindrical Lévy processes.

During my time as a PhD student at King’s, I was presented with numerous opportunities to explore the mathematical landscape by giving talks at international conferences, attending summer schools and going on research visits. I would like to thank the Department of Mathematics for making all of these financially feasible.

After finishing my PhD, I joined the stochastics group of the Korteweg-de Vries Instituut of the University of Amsterdam, where I am currently a postdoctoral researcher under the guidance of Sonja Cox.

Dr Yannic Rath

My PhD at King’s College allowed me to build upon my great interest in studying scientific phenomena with computational approaches, which I developed in previous Physics and Computer Science courses at the Leibniz University Hannover and at Imperial College London. My PhD research focused on the development of novel computational tools to simulate the intricate interplay of particles on the quantum scale underpinning the characteristics of various types of matter. The sheer complexity of the quantum physical laws of nature limits accurate computational simulations, making suitable approximations necessary for tractable applications. Complementing a broad variety of algorithms tackling this long-standing task on various levels of abstraction, we were able to introduce a novel numerical toolbox expanding the predictive abilities of numerical simulations by bridging physical intuition with modern machine learning techniques. 

Building on the wonderful experience of my time at King’s College, I continue to follow my research interests as a computational scientist. I recently joined the National Physical Laboratory, where my focus remains the development of algorithms for the description, study, and utilization of quantum physical principles. I am looking forward to continuing studying interesting scientific questions, developing practical computational tools, and communicating research highlights to a broader community. 

  Faculty of Nursing, Midwifery and Palliative Care

Dr Lesley Williamson

My thesis was generously funded by the Alzheimer’s Society, Cicley Saunders International, NIHR Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre, and The Atlantic Philanthropies. It focuses on the determinants of emergency department (ED) attendance among people with dementia approaching the end of life. Mapped against the phases of a health programme planning model, I conducted a cohort study of routinely collected hospital and mortality data, a qualitative interview study with people living with dementia and current and bereaved caregivers, and a mixed methods integration to develop a conceptual model and key components of an intervention programme aiming to safely reduce ED attendance among people with dementia.

My PhD was informed by my longstanding commitment to improve dementia care, influenced by my background in psychology, medicine and clinical leadership, and my work as a psychiatry trainee, former National Medical Director’s Clinical Fellow, and more recently, King’s Parliamentary Research intern . My thesis was greatly enriched by the valuable contributions of members of an expert panel of public representatives affected by dementia and the support of Alzheimer’s Society Research Network Monitors.

After submitting my thesis, I led the development and Parliamentary launch of a policy brief calling for better palliative and end-of-life care for people affected by dementia. I continue to promote the brief, which includes successfully submitting it to the World Health Organisation’s Global Dementia Observatory Knowledge Exchange Platform ( GDO KEP ).

I continue to research dementia and end-of-life care as a Research Associate at the Cicely Saunders Institute and NIHR Health and Social Care Workforce Research Unit . As a Dem-Comm fellow , I am also one of the Dementia Community Research Network (DCRN) coordinators, working with public, community and research partners to reduce inequalities in research involvement among people from minoritised ethnic communities.

• Meet the winners of the second round of the 22/23 King’s Outstanding Thesis Prize

Congratulations to the second round of winners of the 22/23 King’s Outstanding Thesis Prize!

Each year a limited number of awards are given to celebrate truly outstanding research and theses completed by King’s doctoral students. The prizes are nominated by the external examiners and are judged by a panel consisting of the College’s Director of Research Talent and the Chair of the Research Degrees Examinations Board. There are two rounds, in January and June, and these are the winners from the second round in June 2023.

Meet our winners: 

Dr Jonathan Powell, Faculty of Arts and Humanities  

I am delighted and very grateful to have received this award, which would not have been possible without the support and kindness of some extraordinary people. In particular, the brilliance, patience, and guidance of my supervisor, Prof. Lucy Munro, was instrumental to the researching and writing of a thesis that looks very different to its original conception. My time at King’s has been backdropped – and to a large extent defined – by my work for the Centre for Early Modern Studies (CEMS), and I am grateful, too, to centre directors past and present for their trust and advice over the past four years. I am especially indebted to Dr Hannah Murphy, under whom it has been a privilege to learn and who has shaped my thinking in myriad ways. Thanks are also due to the Institute of Historical Research for their award of a doctoral fellowship, and to King’s more generally for the opportunity to pursue this research.  

My thesis proposed a new approach to early modern English theatrical history through the legal record, resulting in new understandings of how common law shaped theatrical consciousness during a period of extraordinary and still unsurpassed litigiousness. Key to this work was close readings of hundreds of Latin entries in the plea rolls of the common law court of King’s Bench, with a particular interest in the voices and experiences of many previously invisible women connected to England’s first commercial theatres. I have been fortunate enough to continue developing this aspect of my work through a pair of postdoctoral research fellowships: the first, a three-month position on the Leverhulme Trust-funded project ‘Engendering the Stage: The Records of Early Modern Performance’ (jointly based at King’s and the University of Roehampton), and now at Leiden University in the Netherlands, where I’m part of the ERC-funded FEATHERS project investigating early modern manuscript culture and the mediation of authorship.  

Dr Cathleen Hagemann, Faculty of Dentistry, Oral and Craniofacial studies

I studied biology at the University of Bonn and discovered my fascination with the brain and its intricate functions. To deepen my understanding, I continued my studies at the 

University of Tübingen, specializing in cellular and molecular neuroscience. During this time, my focus was on the molecular composition of the neuronal cytoskeleton, utilizing super-resolution microscopy and click-chemistry techniques.  

I was fortunate to join Andrea Serio’s lab for my PhD, where I applied bioengineering methods to model the relationship between cell shape and function in vitro, with a specific emphasis on neurons. Our primary goal was to create a platform enabling us to investigate how neurons adapt to varying axon lengths. By using this platform, we were able to uncover significant changes in biological processes that occur with an increase in axonal length. Notably, we found that homeostasis and metabolic processes undergo significant alterations when comparing 1cm long axons to shorter ones measuring 3mm in length. We were happy to share our findings by publishing this work in Advanced Healthcare Materials . Outside of my PhD research, I thoroughly enjoyed supervising students through the in2 science program, aiming to inspire others about the fascinating intersection between engineering and biology.  

Currently, I am actively using our platform to delve deeper into the intricacies and communication processes within neurons. Simultaneously, we are working on developing protocols that would enable biologists, even those without prior bioengineering knowledge, to utilize bioengineering tools. Our hope is that this effort will contribute to making cell culture-friendly devices more accessible to everyone, allowing for modifications and creations in this field.  

Dr Emma Williams, Faculty of Life Sciences and Medicine

research focused on newborn lung disease including the novel use of non-invasive monitoring techniques, pulmonary mechanics, and predictive models of bronchopulmonary dysplasia. It was an honour to be awarded the Bengt Roberston award by the European Society for Paediatric Research (ESPR) in 2020 for research concerning the neonatal lung, and I was recently elected as a junior council member onto the ESPR pulmonology board.

As a clinician I remain determined to improve the clinical outcomes of newborn infants by combining my passion of academia with clinical medicine. I am currently undertaking a neonatal fellowship in Canada at The Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto – expanding my clinical experience, forming research collaborations, and gaining an international perspective on healthcare. It was a huge privilege to be awarded a King’s Outstanding Thesis Award and I would like to thank my supervisors (Professor Anne Greenough & Professor Theodore Dassios) for all their support throughout this journey, without whom none of this would have been possible.

Dr Luo Li, Faculty of Law

I am Luo Li, and have acquired my PhD degree this spring from School of Law, King’s College London. Before I came to King’s, I studied law for many years in China and acquired the PhD degree in Wuhan University, China. Thanks to my strong interest in legal research, I chose to continue my study in King’s since Oct, 2018. With Professor Ozlem Gurses ’ patient guidance during these four and a half years, I made deep research into the topic of how the assured can be remedied for the insurer’s late payment by Section 13A of Insurance Act 2015. I also published two relevant papers, “Compound interest for late payment of the indemnity insurance claim” in British Insurance Law Association Journal, (2001) Issue 134 and “Reconsidering the reinsured’s damages and costs for late payment: a comparative analysis between English and American law” in Business Law Review, (2022) Issue 6. Now I have gone back to China and worked as an associate professor in Law School of Central China Normal University.  

Dr Julia Griem, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience

It’s an honour to be awarded this prize and to have my doctoral work recognised by King’s College London. Thank you to everyone involved! I greatly enjoyed my time.

I studied Psychology (BSc, Royal Holloway) and Clinical Neuroscience (MSc, University College London) and was always planning to complete a PhD. This meant I spent valuable years before my PhD working as a research assistant – time I’d advise anybody wanting to complete a PhD to take! The RA work triggered my curiosity to study what is going on in the brains of people with personality disorders, and through the support of my colleague Dr John Tully, my supervisors Prof Nigel Blackwood and Prof Declan Murphy, and my funders the NIHR Maudsley BRC, I was able to pursue this for my PhD. I investigated the brain structure and function, as well as the impact of oxytocin, in males with a history of violent offending and antisocial personality disorder or psychopathy. I received the “Best Presentation” honourable mention award at the international congress of the Society for the Scientific Study of Psychopathy for parts of my PhD research.

I was also awarded funding to conduct some patient and public involvement work. Together with 2 colleagues, we spoke to individuals in probation, prison, as well as medium- and high-secure forensic hospitals with the goal to break down barriers between academia and the criminal justice system. This was very informative for future research planning and helped us understand what people with lived experience want more understanding about. A summary of this work can be found here .

I am now working as a postdoctoral research fellow at University College London, studying the computational behavioural and neurobiological features of borderline personality disorder and mood disorders.

Dr Jessica Mundy, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience

Prior to starting the PhD, I studied Human Sciences at Oxford University. This is where my interest in population genetics began. As part of the 1+3 PhD, I completed the MSc in Genes, Environment, and Development in Psychology and Psychiatry, which paired research methods in statistical genetics with the study of psychopathology. My PhD thesis explored how we can use self-reported data to improve the phenotypes used in genome-wide association studies of mood disorders.    

    A highlight of my PhD was working with Helena Davies to set up a study that investigated how we can educate people with mental health disorders about genetic and environmental risk factors, which is an area close to my heart. Other highlights included teaching MSc students to use R for statistics and presenting at conferences/seminars. Finally, it was a brilliant experience to be part of the SGDP’s Anti-Racism Working Group, which includes some truly inspiring people who do such valuable work for the SGDP community and beyond.    

    After leaving King’s, I started as a post-doc at the Department for Clinical Medicine at Aarhus University, Denmark. Here, I research how we can use polygenic scores to predict clinical outcomes in people with major depressive disorder. I also research the issue of genetic confounding in epidemiological studies. Once I have finished my position in Aarhus, I will be joining a team at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine who research child and adolescent mental health in the UK.    

Dr Mary Tanay, Faculty of Nursing, Midwifery and Palliative Care

My background as a cancer nurse significantly influenced my interest in chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy (CIPN). Prior to my PhD, I have explored the lived experiences of patients and the negative impact of CIPN symptoms on their quality of life particularly after cancer treatment. This greater understanding of CIPN motivated me to undertake research aimed at improving patient experience.   

A self-regulation model of CIPN was developed through my research. The model illustrates the complex processes involved in experiences of CIPN and ways to address this condition. By working with patients and clinicians, we co-designed a behavioural intervention for patients to help them self-monitor CIPN symptoms, communicate and report symptoms to clinicians early and participate in making chemotherapy dose modification decisions with their clinicians. The intervention also supports patients to engage in self-management and safety strategies to reduce the impact of symptoms.   

Since finishing my PhD, I have been working on the feasibility randomised controlled trial of the intervention which is ongoing.  I have also been invited to present my research in various local, national, and international conferences. I continue to work with the scientific community networks I have made links with during my PhD. Currently, I am a Lecturer at the Faculty of Nursing, Midwifery and Palliative Care of King’s College London and President -Elect of the United Kingdom Oncology Nursing Association.  

Dr Hui Huang, Faculty of Social Sciences and Public Policy

Prior to commencing a PhD at King’s Department of International Development, I got a master degree in University College London majoring Development Administration and Planning. My PHD thesis, entitled “The Algorithmic Antagonism: The Digital Contested Terrain of Control and Resistance in China’s Platform Economy”, which examines how the digital technology reshapes the capital-labour relations in the new digital workplace in China’s context. For this, I did almost one-year ethnographic research through working as a food-delivery driver in a famous food-delivery company. Due to this in-depth participatory study, my work was published in prestigious journals like Journal of Contemporary China, Journal of Contemporary Asia, and New Technology, Work and Employment. The research findings were also quoted in famous media includes Wired and Al Jazeera.  

I am now working as an assistant professor at the Department of Public Economics and Social Policy in Shanghai Jiao tong University, where I will continue and expand my research on the algorithmic management, platform economy and gig migrant workers.   

I am incredibly honored to receive the King’s Outstanding Thesis Prize. I am especially grateful to my supervisors, Professor Matt Moran and Dr Heather Williams, for their steadfast guidance and to my examiners, Professor Andrew Futter and Professor Michal Onderco, for their thoughtful engagement with the thesis.   

My PhD examined U.S. public opinion of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. It introduced an original framework for assessing how various factors shape public responses to nuclear proliferation, shedding light on the public’s role in and engagement with nuclear issues. While studying as a Marshall Scholar, I also worked as a research assistant at the Centre for Science and Security Studies, working on projects related to the P5 Process, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons; transatlantic deterrence; and the impact of social media on conflict escalation. I also worked in the Nuclear Policy Programme at the Royal United Services Institute on projects related to strategic stability, disarmament verification, and the UK Project on Nuclear Issues. I completed my final year of the PhD as a Stanton Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.   

Since finishing the PhD, I have stayed on at Carnegie as a Fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program. There, my research focuses on public opinion of nuclear weapons issues; challenges climate change poses to nuclear weapons; and multilateral nuclear regimes.  

• Announcing the winner of the 2022 Tadion Rideal Prize 

We are pleased to announce the winner of the 2022 Tadion Rideal prize, Dr Francesca Mattedi!

This award was instituted in 1983 by a gift of £10,000 from Dr J. Tadion to commemorate his association with the late Sir Eric Rideal FRS and King’s College London.

The prize of £1,000 is awarded annually and is open to doctoral students of King’s College London who have carried out research for a PhD degree in Molecular Science. ‘Molecular Science’ is defined broadly and inclusively as: Research that involves studies at the molecular level.

Students are nominated by their supervisors; an expert panel of academics in the relevant fields assesses the nominations and provide a shortlist to the Director of Research Talent who selects the winner based on their recommendations.

Meet this year’s winner, Dr Francesca Mattedi:

It is a great honour for me to receive the 2022 Tadion Rideal Prize for my PhD thesis. I would like to thank my supervisor Dr. Alessio Vagnoni for his guidance over the years, as well as the members of the lab and all those who supported me during this time.

With this in mind, in February 2018 I started my PhD in the lab of Dr. Alessio Vagnoni at the Maurice Wohl Clinical Neuroscience Institute, King’s College London. My work focused on the study of the interplay between mitochondrial dynamics and function, to understand how they influence each other and how their impairment contributes to neuronal ageing. To this aim, a significant part of my project involved the development of optogenetic tools for the manipulation of both mitochondrial function and dynamics with spatiotemporal precision. I really enjoyed this process and I believe that generating innovative techniques is essential to improve our ability to answer scientific questions and our understanding of biological processes.

After my PhD, I was keen on applying the expertise I gained during this experience to investigate the pathways leading to neurodegeneration in human cellular models. Therefore, I have joined the lab of Prof. Pietro Fratta at the UCL Institute of Neurology as a postdoctoral research fellow. Here, I model the loss of TDP-43 nuclear function in human iPSC-derived lower motor neurons to study how it affects axons and neuronal physiology in ALS.

• Top 10s – Getting the best from supervision

Nigel Eady, Director of Research Talent.

Far and away the most important relationship during your PhD is with your primary supervisor.

Many successful academics were launched into their careers by a fantastic supervisor. However, it’s not a given that everything runs smoothly.

We know how important good supervision is and are part of a UK-wide project to develop the very best continuing professional development for research supervisors .

Having worked with numerous PhD students and supervisors in various guises since I finished my own PhD in 2003/4, here are my top 10 tips for getting the best from your supervisory relationship.

1. Discuss expectations and agree ways of working early on

It’s not a given that a student and supervisor’s expectations of how to work effectively together will match. You might be fortunate, but don’t make assumptions. Ideally in your first few supervisory meetings you should discuss how you’re going to work together and what you can expect of each other.

Your faculty should have a template document to guide you and your supervisor in this conversation. You can also download our template to get you started.  If you didn’t have that conversation at the start, don’t worry, have it now!

2. Review ways of working regularly

It’s also important to revisit the expectations conversation every now and then. As you progress in your PhD, your needs will change and the support your supervisor provides will likely change too. So revisit that conversation.

3. Remember your supervisor isn’t perfect!

It sounds obvious, but some students definitely have an unrealistic view of their supervisor. Remember they are human and likely have many other draws on their time, whether other students or other responsibilities, at work and at home. Be careful of slipping into bad habits – submitting work at the last minute and expecting a speedy response, for example.

4. Ask for help when you need it

Most PhD students are highly successful, hard-working people, used to getting top grades. Seriously! That’s you! As such, a PhD can be a challenge. You’re (suddenly) expected to be self-directed and you may come up against all sorts of issues. Your ideas are critiqued and pulled apart. Seemingly fruitful avenues of enquiry turn out to be dead ends. Experiments don’t work, archives don’t yield the information and insights you hoped for, fieldwork takes twice as long to plan as you’d imagined! Something happens in your personal life. You’ll need help. It’s normal.

5. If there are problems then raise them, don’t let them fester

Just ask for help sooner rather than later! There’s no shame in it. You’ll probably address the problems more quickly if you nip them in the bud. We’ve all been there, I can assure you.

There are lots of routes you can go depending on the issue:

• Is there a PGR officer in your dept? Someone in Professional Services who can help with practice things.
• Maybe you need to speak to your academic PGR Coordinator.
• There may be confidential advisors or personal tutors, depending on your faculty.
• There is also the Associate Dean for Doctoral Studies, your faculty PGR lead.
• And there is lots of support through Student Services – for mental health and wellbeing, counselling, money & housing advice and more
• Our PGR Wellbeing Hub has all the links and information com/pgrwh

6. Make use of your second supervisor

I hope you know who your second supervisor is! There’s no one shape for what a second supervisor can offer. Just make use of them. Have regular meetings even if they’re not that frequent. They might be a sounding board for new ideas. They might have a specific skill/interest/expertise that will enrich your research/thesis. They might be very experienced and therefore be a fount of knowledge or provide access to networks. Like I say, there’s no one type.

7. Manage upwards

If you’re not getting what you need from your supervisor then you may need to be more assertive. We can help you with that… book for our workshop

Getting the Best from your Supervisor ( PGR324 )

This course will help you to understand your supervisor’s perspective and expectations and will highlight areas for autonomy and supervision throughout a doctoral journey. Learn how to be assertive and persuasive in the way that you communicate with your supervisors to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes.

8. Celebrate your supervisor if they’re doing a good job!

A lot of supervisors put a lot of time and energy into supervision. If that’s your supervisor then I can assure you that a kind word of thanks goes a long way.

If your supervisor really is excellent then you might like to nominate them for one of our Supervisory Excellence Awards .

Supervisory Excellence Award Winners 2022/23

9. Remember it’s your PhD!

I’m probably speaking more to scientists and lab-based researchers here but fundamentally the PhD is yours! In some disciplines your supervisor may play a very close guiding role, especially the start, but don’t let that lull you into a false sense of dependence. You will have to defend your thesis in the final exam. So don’t be afraid to try things you think are important and to discuss options robustly with your supervisor(s). As you progress in your research you should be becoming an expert, so don’t give way to critique too quickly.

In other disciplines, you may be only too aware that it’s your PhD! So…

10. Draw on as many sources of wisdom and support as you can

It can be easy to get stuck in a rut. So don’t!

Seek out other sources of support, find a mentor or two. Attend seminars in other related departments. Approach other researchers and academics. Make the most of being at a comprehensive research-intensive institution. Time spent thinking about bigger issues, the broader research context is rarely wasted and may yield information, stimulate new ideas and help you move forward.

I wish you all the very best in your doctoral research.

Nigel Eady Director of Research Talent

• Top 10s – Who’s on your team?

Who are the people who are helping you to be successful? Are you making the most of that support? Is there more support you could draw on?

I’ve been watching a lot of the Athletics recently. My father loved running and whilst he wasn’t ever close to being national standard, he had friends who were pretty close to it. When I was young, the TV would always be on if there was a big event happening, especially the Olympics or European Championships.

I think athletics is a pretty good analogy for the journey of the PhD.

We tend to think of athletics as an individual sport, but it struck me how many of the athletes talked about all the other people who had enabled them to be successful – family, friends, coaches, other current athletes, former athletes, the list went on.

When it comes down to it, like the athlete in the championship on the race track, there’s only one person who writes the thesis and goes through the oral exam.

Yet also like the athlete, to be really successful, you need a whole host of people supporting you and cheering you on.

Thirty or more years ago, a PhD was a solitary pursuit. You did everything on your own, with just the guidance of your solitary supervisor. However those days should be long gone. It’s well recognised that effective training of inexperienced researchers requires much more than one person! So who is on your team? Every athlete draws on a slightly different group of people, or perhaps draws on some people more than others.

Here is a Top 10 of people whom you might draw on. There’s no ‘one size fits all’. However, I’d dare to suggest if you’re not making use of most of these possible supporters, then you’re giving yourself an unnecessary handicap!

1. Supervisor

Certainly the most crucial person in your team. How well are you working together? When I’m discussing challenges with doctoral researchers, it’s often the case that there are mismatches in expectations between student and supervisor. Maybe you discussed expectations when you started your research degree but things change. If you’re in the final phases of the PhD and writing up, you’re likely entering new territory in your relationship. What can you expect from your supervisor then? What do you think you need? Have you had a proper conversation about writing the thesis or is it all based on assumption, what you’ve heard from others? Use your time effectively by having a clear discussion with your supervisor about what you think you need and what they can offer you. And this is true throughout the PhD.

2. Second supervisor

Hopefully you know who your second supervisor is! How often do you meet them? What do you discuss? Every second supervisor will be a bit different. Maybe yours brings a particular interest or skill to the table. Maybe their research interests are related but in a somewhat different area. What do you need from them? Maybe it’s just general discussions about how to tackle the PhD. Do you know their strengths? What can you learn from them? How can they add either to your research or your skills?

3. Other academic colleagues, researchers/staff at different levels

Sometimes you just need someone who gets the academic and research environment but isn’t connected to your project. Someone else in your department or even in another School or Faculty. Maybe you share an interest outside your research. Maybe you’ve had an interesting conversation in a dept seminar and they seemed like someone you’d get on with. It’s great to have a few people around you who understand your world and can offer advice, contacts or experience.

Do you have a mentor? There are many ways to get a mentor – formal schemes and informal approaches. A mentor can be invaluable for navigating complex environments or for considering what next. Having run mentoring schemes in the past, I think you get the most value from a mentor when you, as a mentee, are in the driving seat, making sure the mentoring is providing what you need.

I hope you have a few people around you who know exactly what you’re going through now. You may be fortunate and have lab colleagues or peers in your dept who share an office with you. Downloading your woes to someone who understands can definitely be cathartic (as long as you promise to be that person for them when they need you!)

6. Staff who support doctoral students – academics and professional services

You should have a PGR Coordinator or equivalent in your department, whose role is to support and advise doctoral researchers. You may also have PS staff who support PhDs. They may be the people you ask very basic questions about the PhD and the process, they may be the ones who can guide you if problems arise, whether complex ones or very simple ones.

7. One-to-one expert support

Did you know you can meet one-to-one with a careers consultant to discuss any career related issue or question? You might have no idea what to do next or what you want to do? They’ll help you to start working that out. You might need advice on a job application or an interview. You can also meet one-to-one with a professional writer to help you with your writing. Maybe you’re struggling to get words on paper. Maybe you’ve got the words down but you’re struggling for clarity or to communicate your argument.

8. Support services

In a similar vein, there is lots of support at King’s – start with Student Services (housing, money and more), who will point you to the relevant team. Ask for help before it all gets too much.

Sometimes you just need someone to tell you to forget your research for a few hours or a weekend and do something completely different. As a friend of mine says, “Have breaks, make breakthroughs!”

I know not everyone is close to their family, but if you are, they are clearly a great resource. Perhaps your family are far away? If so, why not plan ahead – put a home visit in the diary, something to look forward to.

Like I say, different people need different help at different times. Just don’t suffer in silence!

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How To Write The Results/Findings Chapter

For quantitative studies (dissertations & theses).

By: Derek Jansen (MBA) | Expert Reviewed By: Kerryn Warren (PhD) | July 2021

So, you’ve completed your quantitative data analysis and it’s time to report on your findings. But where do you start? In this post, we’ll walk you through the results chapter (also called the findings or analysis chapter), step by step, so that you can craft this section of your dissertation or thesis with confidence. If you’re looking for information regarding the results chapter for qualitative studies, you can find that here .

Overview: Quantitative Results Chapter

• What exactly the results chapter is
• What you need to include in your chapter
• How to structure the chapter
• Tips and tricks for writing a top-notch chapter
• Free results chapter template

What exactly is the results chapter?

The results chapter (also referred to as the findings or analysis chapter) is one of the most important chapters of your dissertation or thesis because it shows the reader what you’ve found in terms of the quantitative data you’ve collected. It presents the data using a clear text narrative, supported by tables, graphs and charts. In doing so, it also highlights any potential issues (such as outliers or unusual findings) you’ve come across.

But how’s that different from the discussion chapter?

Well, in the results chapter, you only present your statistical findings. Only the numbers, so to speak – no more, no less. Contrasted to this, in the discussion chapter , you interpret your findings and link them to prior research (i.e. your literature review), as well as your research objectives and research questions . In other words, the results chapter presents and describes the data, while the discussion chapter interprets the data.

Let’s look at an example.

In your results chapter, you may have a plot that shows how respondents to a survey  responded: the numbers of respondents per category, for instance. You may also state whether this supports a hypothesis by using a p-value from a statistical test. But it is only in the discussion chapter where you will say why this is relevant or how it compares with the literature or the broader picture. So, in your results chapter, make sure that you don’t present anything other than the hard facts – this is not the place for subjectivity.

It’s worth mentioning that some universities prefer you to combine the results and discussion chapters. Even so, it is good practice to separate the results and discussion elements within the chapter, as this ensures your findings are fully described. Typically, though, the results and discussion chapters are split up in quantitative studies. If you’re unsure, chat with your research supervisor or chair to find out what their preference is.

What should you include in the results chapter?

Following your analysis, it’s likely you’ll have far more data than are necessary to include in your chapter. In all likelihood, you’ll have a mountain of SPSS or R output data, and it’s your job to decide what’s most relevant. You’ll need to cut through the noise and focus on the data that matters.

This doesn’t mean that those analyses were a waste of time – on the contrary, those analyses ensure that you have a good understanding of your dataset and how to interpret it. However, that doesn’t mean your reader or examiner needs to see the 165 histograms you created! Relevance is key.

How do I decide what’s relevant?

At this point, it can be difficult to strike a balance between what is and isn’t important. But the most important thing is to ensure your results reflect and align with the purpose of your study .  So, you need to revisit your research aims, objectives and research questions and use these as a litmus test for relevance. Make sure that you refer back to these constantly when writing up your chapter so that you stay on track.

As a general guide, your results chapter will typically include the following:

• Some demographic data about your sample
• Reliability tests (if you used measurement scales)
• Descriptive statistics
• Inferential statistics (if your research objectives and questions require these)
• Hypothesis tests (again, if your research objectives and questions require these)

We’ll discuss each of these points in more detail in the next section.

Importantly, your results chapter needs to lay the foundation for your discussion chapter . This means that, in your results chapter, you need to include all the data that you will use as the basis for your interpretation in the discussion chapter.

For example, if you plan to highlight the strong relationship between Variable X and Variable Y in your discussion chapter, you need to present the respective analysis in your results chapter – perhaps a correlation or regression analysis.

Need a helping hand?

How do I write the results chapter?

There are multiple steps involved in writing up the results chapter for your quantitative research. The exact number of steps applicable to you will vary from study to study and will depend on the nature of the research aims, objectives and research questions . However, we’ll outline the generic steps below.

Step 1 – Revisit your research questions

The first step in writing your results chapter is to revisit your research objectives and research questions . These will be (or at least, should be!) the driving force behind your results and discussion chapters, so you need to review them and then ask yourself which statistical analyses and tests (from your mountain of data) would specifically help you address these . For each research objective and research question, list the specific piece (or pieces) of analysis that address it.

At this stage, it’s also useful to think about the key points that you want to raise in your discussion chapter and note these down so that you have a clear reminder of which data points and analyses you want to highlight in the results chapter. Again, list your points and then list the specific piece of analysis that addresses each point. 

Next, you should draw up a rough outline of how you plan to structure your chapter . Which analyses and statistical tests will you present and in what order? We’ll discuss the “standard structure” in more detail later, but it’s worth mentioning now that it’s always useful to draw up a rough outline before you start writing (this advice applies to any chapter).

Step 2 – Craft an overview introduction

As with all chapters in your dissertation or thesis, you should start your quantitative results chapter by providing a brief overview of what you’ll do in the chapter and why . For example, you’d explain that you will start by presenting demographic data to understand the representativeness of the sample, before moving onto X, Y and Z.

This section shouldn’t be lengthy – a paragraph or two maximum. Also, it’s a good idea to weave the research questions into this section so that there’s a golden thread that runs through the document.

Step 3 – Present the sample demographic data

The first set of data that you’ll present is an overview of the sample demographics – in other words, the demographics of your respondents.

For example:

• What age range are they?
• How is gender distributed?
• How is ethnicity distributed?
• What areas do the participants live in?

The purpose of this is to assess how representative the sample is of the broader population. This is important for the sake of the generalisability of the results. If your sample is not representative of the population, you will not be able to generalise your findings. This is not necessarily the end of the world, but it is a limitation you’ll need to acknowledge.

Of course, to make this representativeness assessment, you’ll need to have a clear view of the demographics of the population. So, make sure that you design your survey to capture the correct demographic information that you will compare your sample to.

But what if I’m not interested in generalisability?

Well, even if your purpose is not necessarily to extrapolate your findings to the broader population, understanding your sample will allow you to interpret your findings appropriately, considering who responded. In other words, it will help you contextualise your findings . For example, if 80% of your sample was aged over 65, this may be a significant contextual factor to consider when interpreting the data. Therefore, it’s important to understand and present the demographic data.

 Step 4 – Review composite measures and the data “shape”.

Before you undertake any statistical analysis, you’ll need to do some checks to ensure that your data are suitable for the analysis methods and techniques you plan to use. If you try to analyse data that doesn’t meet the assumptions of a specific statistical technique, your results will be largely meaningless. Therefore, you may need to show that the methods and techniques you’ll use are “allowed”.

Most commonly, there are two areas you need to pay attention to:

#1: Composite measures

The first is when you have multiple scale-based measures that combine to capture one construct – this is called a composite measure .  For example, you may have four Likert scale-based measures that (should) all measure the same thing, but in different ways. In other words, in a survey, these four scales should all receive similar ratings. This is called “ internal consistency ”.

Internal consistency is not guaranteed though (especially if you developed the measures yourself), so you need to assess the reliability of each composite measure using a test. Typically, Cronbach’s Alpha is a common test used to assess internal consistency – i.e., to show that the items you’re combining are more or less saying the same thing. A high alpha score means that your measure is internally consistent. A low alpha score means you may need to consider scrapping one or more of the measures.

#2: Data shape

The second matter that you should address early on in your results chapter is data shape. In other words, you need to assess whether the data in your set are symmetrical (i.e. normally distributed) or not, as this will directly impact what type of analyses you can use. For many common inferential tests such as T-tests or ANOVAs (we’ll discuss these a bit later), your data needs to be normally distributed. If it’s not, you’ll need to adjust your strategy and use alternative tests.

To assess the shape of the data, you’ll usually assess a variety of descriptive statistics (such as the mean, median and skewness), which is what we’ll look at next.

Step 5 – Present the descriptive statistics

Now that you’ve laid the foundation by discussing the representativeness of your sample, as well as the reliability of your measures and the shape of your data, you can get started with the actual statistical analysis. The first step is to present the descriptive statistics for your variables.

For scaled data, this usually includes statistics such as:

• The mean – this is simply the mathematical average of a range of numbers.
• The median – this is the midpoint in a range of numbers when the numbers are arranged in order.
• The mode – this is the most commonly repeated number in the data set.
• Standard deviation – this metric indicates how dispersed a range of numbers is. In other words, how close all the numbers are to the mean (the average).
• Skewness – this indicates how symmetrical a range of numbers is. In other words, do they tend to cluster into a smooth bell curve shape in the middle of the graph (this is called a normal or parametric distribution), or do they lean to the left or right (this is called a non-normal or non-parametric distribution).
• Kurtosis – this metric indicates whether the data are heavily or lightly-tailed, relative to the normal distribution. In other words, how peaked or flat the distribution is.

A large table that indicates all the above for multiple variables can be a very effective way to present your data economically. You can also use colour coding to help make the data more easily digestible.

For categorical data, where you show the percentage of people who chose or fit into a category, for instance, you can either just plain describe the percentages or numbers of people who responded to something or use graphs and charts (such as bar graphs and pie charts) to present your data in this section of the chapter.

When using figures, make sure that you label them simply and clearly , so that your reader can easily understand them. There’s nothing more frustrating than a graph that’s missing axis labels! Keep in mind that although you’ll be presenting charts and graphs, your text content needs to present a clear narrative that can stand on its own. In other words, don’t rely purely on your figures and tables to convey your key points: highlight the crucial trends and values in the text. Figures and tables should complement the writing, not carry it .

Depending on your research aims, objectives and research questions, you may stop your analysis at this point (i.e. descriptive statistics). However, if your study requires inferential statistics, then it’s time to deep dive into those .

Step 6 – Present the inferential statistics

Inferential statistics are used to make generalisations about a population , whereas descriptive statistics focus purely on the sample . Inferential statistical techniques, broadly speaking, can be broken down into two groups .

First, there are those that compare measurements between groups , such as t-tests (which measure differences between two groups) and ANOVAs (which measure differences between multiple groups). Second, there are techniques that assess the relationships between variables , such as correlation analysis and regression analysis. Within each of these, some tests can be used for normally distributed (parametric) data and some tests are designed specifically for use on non-parametric data.

There are a seemingly endless number of tests that you can use to crunch your data, so it’s easy to run down a rabbit hole and end up with piles of test data. Ultimately, the most important thing is to make sure that you adopt the tests and techniques that allow you to achieve your research objectives and answer your research questions .

In this section of the results chapter, you should try to make use of figures and visual components as effectively as possible. For example, if you present a correlation table, use colour coding to highlight the significance of the correlation values, or scatterplots to visually demonstrate what the trend is. The easier you make it for your reader to digest your findings, the more effectively you’ll be able to make your arguments in the next chapter.

Step 7 – Test your hypotheses

If your study requires it, the next stage is hypothesis testing. A hypothesis is a statement , often indicating a difference between groups or relationship between variables, that can be supported or rejected by a statistical test. However, not all studies will involve hypotheses (again, it depends on the research objectives), so don’t feel like you “must” present and test hypotheses just because you’re undertaking quantitative research.

The basic process for hypothesis testing is as follows:

• Specify your null hypothesis (for example, “The chemical psilocybin has no effect on time perception).
• Specify your alternative hypothesis (e.g., “The chemical psilocybin has an effect on time perception)
• Set your significance level (this is usually 0.05)
• Calculate your statistics and find your p-value (e.g., p=0.01)
• Draw your conclusions (e.g., “The chemical psilocybin does have an effect on time perception”)

Finally, if the aim of your study is to develop and test a conceptual framework , this is the time to present it, following the testing of your hypotheses. While you don’t need to develop or discuss these findings further in the results chapter, indicating whether the tests (and their p-values) support or reject the hypotheses is crucial.

Step 8 – Provide a chapter summary

To wrap up your results chapter and transition to the discussion chapter, you should provide a brief summary of the key findings . “Brief” is the keyword here – much like the chapter introduction, this shouldn’t be lengthy – a paragraph or two maximum. Highlight the findings most relevant to your research objectives and research questions, and wrap it up.

Some final thoughts, tips and tricks

Now that you’ve got the essentials down, here are a few tips and tricks to make your quantitative results chapter shine:

• When writing your results chapter, report your findings in the past tense . You’re talking about what you’ve found in your data, not what you are currently looking for or trying to find.
• Structure your results chapter systematically and sequentially . If you had two experiments where findings from the one generated inputs into the other, report on them in order.
• Make your own tables and graphs rather than copying and pasting them from statistical analysis programmes like SPSS. Check out the DataIsBeautiful reddit for some inspiration.
• Once you’re done writing, review your work to make sure that you have provided enough information to answer your research questions , but also that you didn’t include superfluous information.

If you’ve got any questions about writing up the quantitative results chapter, please leave a comment below. If you’d like 1-on-1 assistance with your quantitative analysis and discussion, check out our hands-on coaching service , or book a free consultation with a friendly coach.

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Thank you. I will try my best to write my results.

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• Dissertation
• How to Write a Results Section | Tips & Examples

How to Write a Results Section | Tips & Examples

Published on 27 October 2016 by Bas Swaen . Revised on 25 October 2022 by Tegan George.

A results section is where you report the main findings of the data collection and analysis you conducted for your thesis or dissertation . You should report all relevant results concisely and objectively, in a logical order. Don’t include subjective interpretations of why you found these results or what they mean – any evaluation should be saved for the discussion section .

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Table of contents

How to write a results section, reporting quantitative research results, reporting qualitative research results, results vs discussion vs conclusion, checklist: research results, frequently asked questions about results sections.

When conducting research, it’s important to report the results of your study prior to discussing your interpretations of it. This gives your reader a clear idea of exactly what you found and keeps the data itself separate from your subjective analysis.

Here are a few best practices:

• Your results should always be written in the past tense.
• While the length of this section depends on how much data you collected and analysed, it should be written as concisely as possible.
• Only include results that are directly relevant to answering your research questions . Avoid speculative or interpretative words like ‘appears’ or ‘implies’.
• If you have other results you’d like to include, consider adding them to an appendix or footnotes.
• Always start out with your broadest results first, and then flow into your more granular (but still relevant) ones. Think of it like a shoe shop: first discuss the shoes as a whole, then the trainers, boots, sandals, etc.

Prevent plagiarism, run a free check.

If you conducted quantitative research , you’ll likely be working with the results of some sort of statistical analysis .

Your results section should report the results of any statistical tests you used to compare groups or assess relationships between variables . It should also state whether or not each hypothesis was supported.

The most logical way to structure quantitative results is to frame them around your research questions or hypotheses. For each question or hypothesis, share:

• A reminder of the type of analysis you used (e.g., a two-sample t test or simple linear regression ). A more detailed description of your analysis should go in your methodology section.
• A concise summary of each relevant result, both positive and negative. This can include any relevant descriptive statistics (e.g., means and standard deviations ) as well as inferential statistics (e.g., t scores, degrees of freedom , and p values ). Remember, these numbers are often placed in parentheses.
• A brief statement of how each result relates to the question, or whether the hypothesis was supported. You can briefly mention any results that didn’t fit with your expectations and assumptions, but save any speculation on their meaning or consequences for your discussion  and conclusion.

A note on tables and figures

In quantitative research, it’s often helpful to include visual elements such as graphs, charts, and tables , but only if they are directly relevant to your results. Give these elements clear, descriptive titles and labels so that your reader can easily understand what is being shown. If you want to include any other visual elements that are more tangential in nature, consider adding a figure and table list .

As a rule of thumb:

• Tables are used to communicate exact values, giving a concise overview of various results
• Graphs and charts are used to visualise trends and relationships, giving an at-a-glance illustration of key findings

Don’t forget to also mention any tables and figures you used within the text of your results section. Summarise or elaborate on specific aspects you think your reader should know about rather than merely restating the same numbers already shown.

Figure 1: Intention to donate to environmental organisations based on social distance from impact of environmental damage.

In qualitative research , your results might not all be directly related to specific hypotheses. In this case, you can structure your results section around key themes or topics that emerged from your analysis of the data.

For each theme, start with general observations about what the data showed. You can mention:

• Recurring points of agreement or disagreement
• Patterns and trends
• Particularly significant snippets from individual responses

Next, clarify and support these points with direct quotations. Be sure to report any relevant demographic information about participants. Further information (such as full transcripts , if appropriate) can be included in an appendix .

‘I think that in role-playing games, there’s more attention to character design, to world design, because the whole story is important and more attention is paid to certain game elements […] so that perhaps you do need bigger teams of creative experts than in an average shooter or something.’

Responses suggest that video game consumers consider some types of games to have more artistic potential than others.

Your results section should objectively report your findings, presenting only brief observations in relation to each question, hypothesis, or theme.

It should not  speculate about the meaning of the results or attempt to answer your main research question . Detailed interpretation of your results is more suitable for your discussion section , while synthesis of your results into an overall answer to your main research question is best left for your conclusion .

I have completed my data collection and analyzed the results.

I have included all results that are relevant to my research questions.

I have concisely and objectively reported each result, including relevant descriptive statistics and inferential statistics .

I have stated whether each hypothesis was supported or refuted.

I have used tables and figures to illustrate my results where appropriate.

All tables and figures are correctly labelled and referred to in the text.

There is no subjective interpretation or speculation on the meaning of the results.

You've finished writing up your results! Use the other checklists to further improve your thesis.

The results chapter of a thesis or dissertation presents your research results concisely and objectively.

In quantitative research , for each question or hypothesis , state:

• The type of analysis used
• Relevant results in the form of descriptive and inferential statistics
• Whether or not the alternative hypothesis was supported

In qualitative research , for each question or theme, describe:

• Recurring patterns
• Significant or representative individual responses
• Relevant quotations from the data

Don’t interpret or speculate in the results chapter.

Results are usually written in the past tense , because they are describing the outcome of completed actions.

The results chapter or section simply and objectively reports what you found, without speculating on why you found these results. The discussion interprets the meaning of the results, puts them in context, and explains why they matter.

In qualitative research , results and discussion are sometimes combined. But in quantitative research , it’s considered important to separate the objective results from your interpretation of them.

Cite this Scribbr article

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Swaen, B. (2022, October 25). How to Write a Results Section | Tips & Examples. Scribbr. Retrieved 3 September 2024, from https://www.scribbr.co.uk/thesis-dissertation/results-section/

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• Knowledge Base
• Dissertation
• How to Write a Results Section | Tips & Examples

How to Write a Results Section | Tips & Examples

Published on August 30, 2022 by Tegan George . Revised on July 18, 2023.

A results section is where you report the main findings of the data collection and analysis you conducted for your thesis or dissertation . You should report all relevant results concisely and objectively, in a logical order. Don’t include subjective interpretations of why you found these results or what they mean—any evaluation should be saved for the discussion section .

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Upload your document to correct all your mistakes in minutes

Table of contents

How to write a results section, reporting quantitative research results, reporting qualitative research results, results vs. discussion vs. conclusion, checklist: research results, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about results sections.

When conducting research, it’s important to report the results of your study prior to discussing your interpretations of it. This gives your reader a clear idea of exactly what you found and keeps the data itself separate from your subjective analysis.

Here are a few best practices:

• Your results should always be written in the past tense.
• While the length of this section depends on how much data you collected and analyzed, it should be written as concisely as possible.
• Only include results that are directly relevant to answering your research questions . Avoid speculative or interpretative words like “appears” or “implies.”
• If you have other results you’d like to include, consider adding them to an appendix or footnotes.
• Always start out with your broadest results first, and then flow into your more granular (but still relevant) ones. Think of it like a shoe store: first discuss the shoes as a whole, then the sneakers, boots, sandals, etc.

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If you conducted quantitative research , you’ll likely be working with the results of some sort of statistical analysis .

Your results section should report the results of any statistical tests you used to compare groups or assess relationships between variables . It should also state whether or not each hypothesis was supported.

The most logical way to structure quantitative results is to frame them around your research questions or hypotheses. For each question or hypothesis, share:

• A reminder of the type of analysis you used (e.g., a two-sample t test or simple linear regression ). A more detailed description of your analysis should go in your methodology section.
• A concise summary of each relevant result, both positive and negative. This can include any relevant descriptive statistics (e.g., means and standard deviations ) as well as inferential statistics (e.g., t scores, degrees of freedom , and p values ). Remember, these numbers are often placed in parentheses.
• A brief statement of how each result relates to the question, or whether the hypothesis was supported. You can briefly mention any results that didn’t fit with your expectations and assumptions, but save any speculation on their meaning or consequences for your discussion  and conclusion.

A note on tables and figures

In quantitative research, it’s often helpful to include visual elements such as graphs, charts, and tables , but only if they are directly relevant to your results. Give these elements clear, descriptive titles and labels so that your reader can easily understand what is being shown. If you want to include any other visual elements that are more tangential in nature, consider adding a figure and table list .

As a rule of thumb:

• Tables are used to communicate exact values, giving a concise overview of various results
• Graphs and charts are used to visualize trends and relationships, giving an at-a-glance illustration of key findings

Don’t forget to also mention any tables and figures you used within the text of your results section. Summarize or elaborate on specific aspects you think your reader should know about rather than merely restating the same numbers already shown.

A two-sample t test was used to test the hypothesis that higher social distance from environmental problems would reduce the intent to donate to environmental organizations, with donation intention (recorded as a score from 1 to 10) as the outcome variable and social distance (categorized as either a low or high level of social distance) as the predictor variable.Social distance was found to be positively correlated with donation intention, t (98) = 12.19, p < .001, with the donation intention of the high social distance group 0.28 points higher, on average, than the low social distance group (see figure 1). This contradicts the initial hypothesis that social distance would decrease donation intention, and in fact suggests a small effect in the opposite direction.

Figure 1: Intention to donate to environmental organizations based on social distance from impact of environmental damage.

In qualitative research , your results might not all be directly related to specific hypotheses. In this case, you can structure your results section around key themes or topics that emerged from your analysis of the data.

For each theme, start with general observations about what the data showed. You can mention:

• Recurring points of agreement or disagreement
• Patterns and trends
• Particularly significant snippets from individual responses

Next, clarify and support these points with direct quotations. Be sure to report any relevant demographic information about participants. Further information (such as full transcripts , if appropriate) can be included in an appendix .

When asked about video games as a form of art, the respondents tended to believe that video games themselves are not an art form, but agreed that creativity is involved in their production. The criteria used to identify artistic video games included design, story, music, and creative teams.One respondent (male, 24) noted a difference in creativity between popular video game genres:

“I think that in role-playing games, there’s more attention to character design, to world design, because the whole story is important and more attention is paid to certain game elements […] so that perhaps you do need bigger teams of creative experts than in an average shooter or something.”

Responses suggest that video game consumers consider some types of games to have more artistic potential than others.

Your results section should objectively report your findings, presenting only brief observations in relation to each question, hypothesis, or theme.

It should not  speculate about the meaning of the results or attempt to answer your main research question . Detailed interpretation of your results is more suitable for your discussion section , while synthesis of your results into an overall answer to your main research question is best left for your conclusion .

I have completed my data collection and analyzed the results.

I have included all results that are relevant to my research questions.

I have concisely and objectively reported each result, including relevant descriptive statistics and inferential statistics .

I have stated whether each hypothesis was supported or refuted.

I have used tables and figures to illustrate my results where appropriate.

All tables and figures are correctly labelled and referred to in the text.

There is no subjective interpretation or speculation on the meaning of the results.

You've finished writing up your results! Use the other checklists to further improve your thesis.

If you want to know more about AI for academic writing, AI tools, or research bias, make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

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The results chapter of a thesis or dissertation presents your research results concisely and objectively.

In quantitative research , for each question or hypothesis , state:

• The type of analysis used
• Relevant results in the form of descriptive and inferential statistics
• Whether or not the alternative hypothesis was supported

In qualitative research , for each question or theme, describe:

• Recurring patterns
• Significant or representative individual responses
• Relevant quotations from the data

Don’t interpret or speculate in the results chapter.

Results are usually written in the past tense , because they are describing the outcome of completed actions.

The results chapter or section simply and objectively reports what you found, without speculating on why you found these results. The discussion interprets the meaning of the results, puts them in context, and explains why they matter.

In qualitative research , results and discussion are sometimes combined. But in quantitative research , it’s considered important to separate the objective results from your interpretation of them.

Cite this Scribbr article

If you want to cite this source, you can copy and paste the citation or click the “Cite this Scribbr article” button to automatically add the citation to our free Citation Generator.

George, T. (2023, July 18). How to Write a Results Section | Tips & Examples. Scribbr. Retrieved September 3, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/dissertation/results/

Is this article helpful?

Tegan George

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1. Sources : Papyrus St.-Petersburg 1116A, P.Moscow 4658 & P.Carlsberg 6. 2. King Khety III and his son Merikare. 3. The text of the Instruction to Merikare . 4. Notes. 5. Egyptian sacred literature. 6. Egyptian wisdom literature.

1. The Sources

► discovery The text of the Instruction to Merikare was preserved in three fragmentary papyri. The oldest, dating from the second half of the XVIIIth Dynasty (ca. 1539 - 1292 BCE), the so-called "Papyrus St.-Petersburg 1116A", is the most complete, but also the most corrupt, with numerous lacunae and many scribal errors. Papyrus Moscow 4658 dates from the end of the XVIIIth Dynasty, while Papyrus Carlsberg 6 may even be later. An English translation was made by Gardiner (1914) & Erman (1927). A new comparative study of the available sources was done by Volten (1945). Lichtheim (1976), Helck (1977), Brunner (1991) & Parkinson (1997) made recent translations. Regarding Papyrus St.-Petersburg, Volten remarks : "Dieser Papyrus ist auf der Vorderseite mit Geschenklisten beschrieben, die es möglich machen, die Rückseite mit unsrem Text zur Zeit des Amenophis II zu datieren." Volten , 1945, p.3. The following temporal layers may be discerned :

► literary features In the First Intermediate Period (ca. 2198 -1938 BCE), the stela became the carrier of a short autobiography, and equipped with an offering scene and its adjacent prayer. This was a memorial, the repository of a person's life, a succinct summary of achievement. The royal instruction was the second literary legacy of this transitional period :  the testament of a departing King to his son and successor. The Instruction to Merikare mentions the instruction of an earlier King Khety. It is therefore only the earliest preserved work of this type. The work has no "fully sustained compositional coherence as found in comparable works of the Twelfth Dynasty" ( Lichtheim , p.98). Indeed, the same topic reappears in different places and a buildup is deflected. However, an overall plan is present, although it is loose. Compared with that of Ptahhotep , Khety's instruction has a compositional structure which is less "constructed". On the one hand, the sentences do not "bind" in the same way and although the orational style is used, the author introduces spontaneous associations which are secundary and move away from the main stream of the mindset. On the other hand, the address is more personal and apparently in tune with the psychology of his son, whereas the Maxims of Good Discourse are a general, more standardized treatise on wisdom, expressing the teachings of any (noble) father to his (accomplished) son. Does this suggest the work is indeed a composition made by the King himself ? The salient literary features are :

2 King Khety III and his son Merikare

At the end of the Old Kingdom, the stable pharaonic system slowly broke down. During the nine decades of the reign of the last Pharaoh of the VIth Dynasty, Pepi II (ca.2246 - 2152) -the longest reign in history- the way was paved for the collapse of the Old Kingdom under the pressure of internal weakening. A folk tale of the New Kingdom depicts Pepi II as a weak personality with abnormal tendencies ... No serious dangers threatened Egypt from Western Asia or Nubia, although attacks on Egyptian expeditions seems to have been more frequent. One important factor was the increase in the number of cults freed by royal decree from taxes and other obligations, placing a burden on the royal treasury, diminishing is power and majesty (cf. the number of buildings built). Low Nile floods are also to be noted, as well as a climate change ca. 2200 BCE (probably a world-wide small ice age).  "But the decisive factor was that the archaic, patriarchal structure of the adminstration was no longer adequate to meet the more specialized demands of the era and thus not suited in all respects to the tenor of the times." - Hornung , 1999, p.41. The weak administration was no longer able to run the country as a whole and the consequences were economical difficulties, famine and struggle for life itself (while Pharaoh made enormous gifts to the temples). Economic need occupied the center of attention in biographical inscriptions which emerged in this period. This situation triggered two important phenomena :

objective : local potentates acquired the necessary goods for themselves and their subjects. Raids on neighboring regions and the peasants were common. The latter therefore formed armed bands. Safety was lost. Art sank to a provincial level. In the walled homes of the rulers of the nomes (the nomarchs) an urban middle class was formed , focused on the accumulation of private property . These "nedjes" (a pejorative word for "small") designated these new "bourgeois" who made the cities into political centers ;

After Pepi II, the construction of pyramids stopped and in rapid successions at least a dozen Pharaoahs resided in Memphis and nominally ruled the entire land. What exactely happened is unknown (for this period is obscure), but at the end Egypt was divided between the "kings" of two major nomes : Heracleopolis (IXth & Xth Dynasty) in the North (Fayum & Lower Egypt) & Thebes (XIth Dynasty) in the South (Upper Egypt and Nubia). The unity broke up and no great monuments were erected to consolidate the power of the state. The Theban ruling family assumed the royal titulary at about the same time as the nomarchs of Herakleopolis. This fundamental political division initiates the First Intermediate Period, which would last for about a century (ca. 2198 -1938 BCE) . The "House of Khety" ruled Lower Egypt. In general, the southern kingdom was more vital than the northern, but the latter excelled in cultural refinement. "Statues of the Theban rulers were set up in the temple of Heqaib on the island of Elephantine, and we must assume that because of this tie with the south, the Thebans had at their disposal, from the very beginning, seasoned Nubian soldiers who would lend considerable combat strength to the Theban army in the warfare that ensued to reunite the land." - Hornung , 1999, p.45. After some years of peace Mentuhotpe I initiated the decisive battle with Lower Egypt, ruled by Merikare. This attempt was thwarted, and his successor lost the throne. Although the correct sequence of rulers is unknown, the following list of rulers is the reconstruction by Hornung (1999), who's chronology was followed : Southern Kings (Thebes - IXth & Xth Dynasties) :

Mentuhotpe III (Nebtawyre) : 1945 - 1938

Northern Kings (Herakleopolis - between 2160 - 1980 BCE - XIth Dynasty) :

Merikare's unknown successor, probably Ity

► the beginning of the Middle Kingdom The last Pharaoh of the XIth Dynasty was Nebtawyre Mentuhotpe III (ca. 1945 - 1938 BCE). He probably usurped the throne, for he is missing from the king-lists. His mother was a commoner. It is possible he was not a member of the royal family. Of his seven year reign, little is known. He undertook building projects and dispatched his vizier Amenemhat to head an army of workers at the quarries of the Wadi Hammamat for his intended royal tomb. There is a consensus that this is the same Pharaoh Amenemhat who founded the XXIIth Dynasty, although there is no reliable information available. Around 1980 BCE, Egypt was again in the grasp of a single ruler after a century of disunity.

Prologue (P1) "{The beginning of the Teaching made by the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Khety} for his son Merikare. On Rebellion (P2 - P35) (------) 01  May You be justified before the god,                                                         (P30) 05  (but) the cursing of the {furious} of heart is painful. 1 06   If You are skilled in speech, You will win.                                                    (P32) Dealing with officals & commoners (P35 - P68) 16  Copy your fathers, your ancestors,                                                              (P35) 24   (and) the god will be praised for the donations, 2 28   Respect the officials, sustain your people,                                                  (P38) 41   just as he leaves who indulged himself. 3 42  Make your officials great, so that they act by your laws.                             (P42) 54  The front of the house puts awe in the back. 4 55  Do justice, then You endure on Earth.                                                        (P46) 70  with free striding feet in the place of secrets ! 5 74   it comes to those who give it water. 6 75  The court that judges the needy, 7                                                               (P53) 88  free-striding like the Lords of Eternity ! 8 Advice on raising troops and religious duties (P57 - P68) 089  Raise your young soldiers and the residence will love You.                        (P57) 098  Make your great ones great, and promote your {soldiers}. 9 108   Make {many} monuments for the god,                                                    (P63) 112   visit the temple, {be discreet} concerning the secrets, 10 116   It is good for him who does it. 11 The historical section (P68 - P108) 123  Diseased and deprived is he who imprisons the evil gang (of rebels),          (P68) 130   as is done to one who strays from the path of the god ... 12 131   Do not deal evilly with the Southland,                                                        (P71) 142   You stand well with the Southland,                                                           (P75) 152   (using) what had been made for what is to be made. 153  Behold, the King is the Lord of Joy !                                                         (P79) 154   May You rest, sleep in your strength, 159   From Hetshenu to {Sembaqa, and its southern border at Two-Fish Channel.} 13 160   I pacified the entire West as far as the coast of the Lake. 14 165   The middle islands are turned back, 15 168   Look, the land they had ravaged has been made into nomes,                     (P85) 175   and Hapy will not fail to come. 16 178  from Hebenu to The Ways of Horus. 17 185   But this should be said to the bowmen :                                                   (P91) 196   But as I live and shall be what I am,                                                    (P94-95) 207   Medenyt has been restored to its nome,                                               (P98-99) 208   its one side is irrigated as far as Kem-Wer. 18 221   It has acted as a dyke as far as Heracleopolis ! 19 225   If your southern border is attacked,                                                        (P106) The glory of kingship (P109 - P123) 237   one will not bring him on one's water on the day of woe. 20 244   The Lord of the Two Shores is one who knows,                                      (P115) 253   Look, a shameful deed occured in my time :                                           (P119) divine justice (P123 - P130) 265   One cannot resist the Lord of the Hand, 21 268   made of costly stones, fashioned of bronze. 22 272   So also, the Ba goes to the place it knows,                                            (P127) 283   The god thinks of him who works for him ! 23 hymn to the creator-god (P130 - P138) 284   Well tended is mankind - the cattle of the god :                               (P130-131) 286   he subdued the water monster, 24 293  when they thought of making rebellion. 25 epilogue (P138) 306  Do no ill (against) my speech, 307  which lays down all the laws of kingship, 308   which instructs You, that You may rule the land ! 309   And may You reach me with none to accuse You ! 310   Do not kill one who is close to You, 311   whom You have favored, the god knows him. 312   He is one of the fortunate ones on Earth ... 313   (for) divine are they who follow the King ! 26 314   Make yourself loved by everyone, 315   (for) a good character is remembered. 316  {When time} has passed, 317   may You be called : 'He who ended the time of trouble' 318  by those who come after the House of Khety, 319   {in thinking} of what has come today. 27 320   Look, I have told You the best of my thoughts ! 321   Act by what is set before You !"                                                                (P144)

(1) the "heart" is the vehicle of all mental, intentional, volitional states - Ptahhotep speaks of the "hot of heart" (cf. the Lexicon of the Maxims) ; (2) "the god" and "god" may be used interchangeably and the definite article has no bearing on meaning but is a matter of style - here we have systematically written "the god" (cf. the Lexicon of the Maxims) ; (3) the righteous person is not stopped by the tribunal of Osiris and may enter the sky, while the one who was not prudent and endulged himself (in heavy drinking, brawling and conflict) is left by the Foremost of the Westeners ; (4) the "back of the house" is the rear, the quaters of the women, children and servants ; (5) the "place of secrets" is that part of the temple where only the priest were allowed to enter ; (6) those who proffer libations, for water is the source of all purity & life ; (7) "sArii" has been translated as "oppressed" (Bear), "der Bedrängte, Notleidende, Bedürftige" (Hannig), and "wD" as "providing justice" to the aggrieved - I go along with Lichtheim, who interprets the passage as envisaging an overall judgment ; (8) these are the spirits of light (the "AX" or "Akh") : the justified deceased, the justified ancestors, the gods and goddesses ; (9) Volten remarks that the "old men" mentioned suggest that "Der Vater Merikares hat also etwas mehr als 20 Jahre regiert" (Volten : 32) - for Ptahhotep, "Swt" means "neighbors, friends, helpers", but here "recruits" (Wilson) is more appropriate ; (10) "kfA Hr sStA" has been translated as "reveal the mysteries", except by Gardiner who is followed here - Lichtheim has "observe" ; (11) it is profitable for him ; (12) Khety confesses that he too strayed from the path of god, i.e. the way of righteousness ; (13) "Two-Fish Channel" also occurs in Papyrus Westcar (IX, 16) and is the name of the Nile branch in the nome of Letopolis, i.e. the soutern-most part of the Canopic branch. Here it denotes the southern boundary of the western Delta ; (14) "the Lake" (like the "great green") is another word for the Mediterranean sea ; (15) or inner islands ;  (16) the Nile will not fail to inundate the land ; (17) Kees insists that Hebenu was a metropolis of the sixteenth nome of Upper Egypt - "Horusway, Horusways, the Ways of Horus" are synonymous with the border fortress of Sile, where the road to Palestine began ; (18) the east bank of the twenty-second nome was recovered by the Heracleopolitans and brought under cultivation up to the Fayum ; (19) Lichtheim understands "dyke" as a metaphor for "protection", for a real dyke from Heracleopolis to the Delta is deemed impossible ; (20) "to be on someone's water" means to be loyal to someone ; (21) Re in his aspect of creator ; (22) the cult statues of the gods carried in procession during the festivals ; (23) god is aware of what people do, he is near, witnesses one's actions and repays one likewise ; (24) the primordial monster defeated when creation emerged in the first time (zep tepi) ; (25) refers to the story of the destruction of mankind which was inscribed on three royal tombs of the XIXth Dynasty (the Book of the Heavenly Cow ) ; (26) those that remain in the following of Pharaoh are gods themselves ; (27) considering what the king has done stimulates his son to emulate and surpass him.

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initiated : 26 V 2004 - last update : 06 I 2016 - version n°3 © Wim van den Dungen

Hugo Dewar 1957

The Moscow Trials ‘Revised’

Source : Problems of Communism , Volume 6, no 1, January-February 1957. Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

For many years Soviet propagandists and pro-Soviet Western observers presented ‘Soviet justice’ as a forward step in the advancement of legal science. Thus, the British jurist DN Pritt wrote, in a contemporary eulogy of the Moscow purge trials of the 1930s, that ‘the judicature and the prosecuting attorney of the USSR [Andrei Vyshinsky] have established their reputation among the legal systems of the world’. [1] Pritt was not at all disconcerted by the singular fact, unparalleled in Western jurisprudence, that the accused in the Soviet trials did not raise a finger to defend themselves, but instead confessed with seeming eagerness to the most heinous crimes. The Soviet government, he blandly stated, ‘would have preferred that all or most of the accused should have pleaded not guilty and contested the case’. [2]

The naïveté, or wilful blindness, of such statements has long been apparent. As early as 1937, an independent commission of inquiry conducted an exhaustive investigation into the Moscow trials of 1936 and 1937 and found them to be clear-cut travesties of justice. [3] The commission’s findings were bolstered by an ever-mounting accumulation of evidence regarding the methods employed to produce the victims’ obviously abnormal eagerness to sign their own death warrants.

Today not even the most naïve apologist can continue his self-deception. At the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU the myth was broken for all time when Nikita Khrushchev, in a secret report to a closed session of the congress, revealed the depths to which Soviet ‘justice’ had sunk:

Stalin originated the concept ‘enemy of the people’. This term automatically rendered unnecessary that the ideological errors of a man or men engaged in a controversy be proven... The formula was specifically introduced for the purpose of physically annihilating such individuals... [4]

It is significant, however, that, in denouncing ‘violations of socialist law’, Khrushchev made no direct mention either of the show trial as such, or of its exportation to the satellites. His remarks about Zinoviev and Kamenev and about the ‘annihilation’ of Lenin’s closest colleagues as ‘enemies of the party’ were furthermore clear attempts to restrict the discussion to ‘violations of socialist law’ in the period following Kirov’s assassination in December 1934 – to the great trials and purges of the 1930s. [5]

This effort is a transparent indication that the present collective leadership cannot make a decisive, radical break with their Stalinist past. It is to Stalin that the present Soviet leaders owe their positions, and it was during his reign that their methods of ‘governing’ and dispensing ‘justice’ were decisively moulded. That is why Khrushchev and his colleagues will not admit that the genesis of the Stalin-type inquisitorial trial goes much farther back than 1934, indeed, as far back as 1922.

The idea of exploiting the judicial trial of political opponents for the purpose of ‘educating’ the masses was first given concrete expression in 1922, when a trial of 22 prominent members of the Social Revolutionary Party was staged. At that time the technique of the show trial had not been perfected, and only ten police stooges consented to play the role of cringing penitents and government propagandists. At first, the state was content with this number and even permitted the rest to defend themselves stoutly. They openly proclaimed their political convictions and even refused to recognise the court. Just prior to the trial, the Bolsheviks entered into an agreement in Berlin with representatives of the international socialist movement by which several prominent socialists were invited to participate in the defence; and in the early stages of the trial they were very active on behalf of the accused. As the trial progressed, however, the intolerable contradictions between accepted conceptions of justice and a Soviet-sponsored political trial were revealed. Bit by bit the essential elements of the show trial, with which the world later became familiar, emerged.

The presiding judge struck the keynote for the proceedings by declaring that the court would be guided not by objective considerations but by the interests of the government. During the course of the trial Bukharin declared the Berlin agreement null and void, and this, coupled with the prosecution’s obstructive tactics, caused the foreign socialists to withdraw. Perhaps most important in the development of the show trial, however, was the first utilisation of the technique of agitating against the accused outside of court. Yuri Pyatakov, the president of the tribunal, spoke at one of the mass demonstrations, as did Bukharin, who applauded the role played in the trial by the ten who had ‘confessed’. [6]

In the course of the next few years the show trial was gradually brought to a high stage of perfection. ‘Evidence’ was manufactured and, by means of inhuman tortures, the accused were brought into court ‘prepared’ to cooperate in arranging their own destruction. During the course of the so-called Shakhty trial (1928), for example, a group of engineers, personifying the ‘bourgeois specialists’, took the blame for the country’s chronic economic ills and accused foreign ‘interventionist circles’ of directing their sabotage. [7] By 1930 the technique had been further perfected, and during the Industrial Party trial every single one of the accused confessed to ‘planned’ sabotage in drafting or implementing the First Five-Year Plan. One of the witnesses, brought in under heavy GPU guard, was Professor Osadchy, formerly a member of the CEC (Central Economic Council) of the Supreme Soviet, and assistant chairman of the State Planning Commission. Incredible as it may seem, Osadchy, who was one of the prosecutors at the Shakhty trial, confessed to having plotted with the very men whom he had sentenced to death in 1928! [8]

Stalin’s speech at the Sixteenth Congress (June-July 1930) gave at least the outward rationale for all the great Moscow trials. [9] His thesis was that whenever the contradictions inherent within the capitalist system grow acute, the bourgeoisie tries to solve them by turning on the Soviet Union. By the bourgeoisie Stalin meant primarily foreign nations, but his main purpose was to justify the purge of internal opposition to his rule. The vast international ‘plots’ which were uncovered regularly involved certain native Communists; often these were among the most celebrated of the revolutionary heroes, their ‘crimes’ consisting in their opposition to Stalin’s dictatorship. Without respect to their previous service, these men were condemned as saboteurs working in collaboration with the outside enemy to wreck the economy of the Soviet Union.

Thus, the Great Purge, as well as the thousands of unpublicised local purges, served the double purpose of removing those who opposed Stalin and of providing for the population an ‘explanation’ of the continuing low standard of living. Vyshinsky made the point in the following manner:

It is now clear why there are interruptions of supplies here and there, why with our riches and abundance of products, there is a shortage first of one thing and then of another. It is these traitors who are responsible. [10]

Vyshinsky also underlined the connection between the various trials. Stalin’s thesis had been proved, he said: all the trials had uncovered ‘systematically conducted espionage... the devilish work of foreign intelligence...’. [11]

Characteristically, although it was ostensibly against Stalin’s thesis and its implications that Khrushchev railed at the Twentieth Congress, his anger was aroused most of all by the fact that Stalin’s wrath had been turned against the party itself:

Using Stalin’s formulation... the provocateurs who had infiltrated the state security organs together with conscienceless careerists... [launched] mass terror against party cadres... It should suffice to say that the number of arrests based on charges of counter-revolutionary crimes had grown ten times between 1936 and 1937. [12]

Khrushchev summed up the Stalin era in anguished tones:

In the main, and in actuality, the only proof of guilt used, against all norms of current legal science, was the ‘confession’ of the accused himself; and, as subsequent probing proved, ‘confessions’ were acquired through physical pressures against the accused. [13]

Khrushchev’s speech is a masterpiece of hypocrisy. To be sure, of the 1966 delegates to the Seventeenth Party Congress (1934), 1108 were arrested on charges of counter-revolutionary activity. But Khrushchev well knows that it was not a question of ‘subsequent probing’: every leading Communist in the Soviet Union knew at the time what was going on. They were aware that the ‘confessions’ were shot through with contradictions and obvious absurdities; they knew that the trials were frame-ups.

As a matter of fact, Khrushchev’s speech itself corroborates our previous evidence that the Politburo was well aware of what was going on:

At the February-March Central Committee Plenum in 1937 many members actually questioned the rightness of the established course regarding mass repressions under the pretext of combating ‘two-facedness’. [14]

Khrushchev thus confirms that opposition to Stalin’s iron-heel policy was expressed even within the Politburo. People who had employed the most despicable methods against both non-party and party opponents began to voice ‘doubts’ when the police terror menaced them. Among those who ventured to speak up in 1937 was Pavel Postyshev, candidate member of the Politburo. Indeed, Khrushchev said that Postyshev expressed his doubts ‘most ably’, as did Stanislav Kossior, a member of the Politburo – both were liquidated. Other prominent Stalinist victims of the monster they themselves helped create were Vlas Chubar, Yan Rudzutak, Grigory Petrovsky and Robert Eikhe: all men of the Lenin era who had thrown in their lot with Stalin in his struggle for power.

How was it, then, that Molotov, Mikoyan, Voroshilov, Khrushchev and others survived? They saved themselves either by keeping their mouths shut or, where their closeness to Stalin made this impossible, by sedulously fostering the cult of the ‘brilliant leader’. Certainly Khrushchev was not unaware of what was going on. Kossior, for example, was purged in the Ukraine while he was closely associated with Khrushchev.

Without speculating about the possible splits and rivalries within the top leadership of the CPSU revealed by the varying degrees of vehemence with which individual Soviet leaders condemned Stalin’s ‘cult of personality’, the central goal of the leadership as a whole is perfectly obvious. Khrushchev and his supporters are vitally concerned with ‘rehabilitating’ the party and strengthening its authority vis-à-vis the police apparatus. The terrors of the Stalinist era left party cadres either demoralised and spiritless or, much worse, cynically and brutally opportunistic. In any event, the leadership felt that the support of the new generation of Communists – the managerial caste and the intellectuals – required assurances that the days of arbitrary terror were over. In Khrushchev’s words:

Arbitrary behaviour by one person encouraged and permitted arbitrariness in others. Mass arrests and deportations of many thousands of people, execution without trial and without normal investigation created conditions of insecurity, fear and even desperation. [15]

The exportation of the macabre and revolting confessional trial to Eastern Europe was never much of a success. The process that had transformed the CPSU into a terrorised and docile instrument of the leader took 14 years; in Poland, Bulgaria and Hungary it was telescoped into less than four years – somewhat longer in Czechoslovakia and Rumania. During this time the weak satellite Communist parties (only in Czechoslovakia could the Communists claim any sizeable following) were deprived of their ablest leaders. It was clear from the trials, moreover, that these leaders were imprisoned and executed because they attempted to stand up to the Soviet Union and that the leaders who remained were mere Soviet satraps. The confession trials of ‘national Communists’ therefore destroyed what little basis the Communist parties had for claiming to represent national interests, or even the interests of the industrial workers. At the same time, they failed dismally to destroy either national sentiment among the people or Titoist tendencies within the rank-and-file of the Communist parties.

Quite on the contrary, there can be no doubt that the confession trials in Eastern Europe played a great role in enhancing anti-Soviet feeling and in undermining the Communist parties’ faith in themselves. The enormous crowds that attended the reinternment of Rajk in Hungary after his posthumous rehabilitation were symptomatic of the anti-Soviet mood that had been generated by the ‘educational’ methods of Soviet-inspired ‘justice’. The bloodless revolt in Poland and the heroic uprising of the Hungarian workers, peasants and intellectuals were due in large part to the exposure of Soviet methods and aims which resulted from the export of the ‘modern inquisition’. The people of the satellite nations share with the Russian people a deep and bitter hatred of the secret police, and a deathless desire to end the insufferable horrors which the confession trial represented.

That the Soviet leaders were, and remain, keenly aware of this was implicit in their repudiation at the Twentieth Congress of the Stalinist inquisition and in the gradual steps that have been instituted to correct some of the more objectionable features of the police and judicial apparatus. They obviously are attempting to restore public confidence in a party and system that had become thoroughly and openly compromised. In so doing, however, they paradoxically underlined still further the bankruptcy of the system that claimed to have produced that ‘glorious workers’ paradise’, the ‘most advanced country in the world’, and they reveal nakedly their inability to cast off the imprint of this system of terror and ‘educational justice’.

1. DN Pritt, The Moscow Trial Was Fair (Russia Today, London, nd).

2. DN Pritt, The Zinoviev Trial (Gollancz, London, 1936).

3. This Commission was headed by the noted American philosopher, John Dewey. Its findings were published in two books: The Case of Leon Trotsky (Secker and Warburg, London, 1937); and Not Guilty (Secker and Warburg, London, 1938).

4. The Anti-Stalin Campaign and International Communism: A Selection Of Documents (Columbia University Press, New York, 1956), p. 13.

5. For a full discussion of these trials see this author’s The Modern Inquisition (Allan Wingate, London, 1953).

6. The most complete record of this trial is in VS Voitinski, The Twelve Who Are About To Die (Delegation of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionists, Berlin, 1922). The death sentences passed against the accused were never carried out.

7. No official records of this trial have been published. Of secondary sources, the best are HH Tiltman, The Terror in Europe (Frederick A Stokes, New York, 1932); and Eugene Lyons, Assignment in Utopia (Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1937), especially pp. 114-33.

8. Andrew Rothstein (ed), Wreckers on Trial (Modern Books, London, 1931).

9. Some of the sources on the most important Moscow trials are the following: on the 1931 Menshevik trial – The Menshevik Trial (Modern Books, London, 1931); on the 1933 Metropolitan-Vickers Industrial Company Trial – The Case of NP   Vitvitsky... [and others] Charged With Wrecking Activities at Power Stations in the Soviet Union (three volumes, State Law Publishing House, Moscow, 1933); on the 1936 trial – The Case of the Trotskyite – Zinovievite Terrorist Centre (People’s Commissariat of Justice of the USSR, Moscow, 1936); on the 1937 trial – Report of Court Proceedings in the Case of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Centre (People’s Commissariat of Justice of the USSR, Moscow, 1937); on the 1938 trial – Report of Court Proceedings in the Case of the Anti-Soviet ‘Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites ’ (People’s Commissariat of Justice of the USSR, Moscow, 1938).

10. Report of Court Proceedings in the Case of the Anti-Soviet ‘Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites ’, pp. 636-37.

11. Report of Court Proceedings in the Case of the Anti-Soviet ‘Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites ’, pp. 636-37.

12. The Anti-Stalin Campaign , p. 30.

13. The Anti-Stalin Campaign , p. 12.

14. The Anti-Stalin Campaign , p. 29.

15. The Anti-Stalin Campaign , p. 14.

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- images reproducing works of art;

- articles that you have authored or co-authored and are part of your thesis.

If you have reused several images and figures from journal articles, please check that they were published Open Access under Creative Commons. If they were, you will not need to seek with the copyright owner any permission to reuse them. Please note that the fact that the third-party material is available in the internet does not prove that the material is either non-copyrighted or genuinely Open Access or belongs in the Public Domain. It might have been unlawfully uploaded.

Whether you have used a well-known image or an image which is rather obscure, we would recommend to check with the Creative Commons searching tool whether there is a version of that image which has been licensed as CC.

If the articles you authored and need to include in your thesis were not published Open Access, it is very likely that you have waived your copyright to the publisher at the time of the article’s acceptance. This means that, even though you wrote it, you must consider your article as third-party copyrighted material and therefore seek for the permission to reuse it (in part or fully). If you fail to obtain it, you may still be able to include (or link to) the author’s accepted manuscript, which you might have already archived in our institutional repository and linked to your profile page .

In general, when you failed to secure permissions to reuse the copyrighted material included in your thesis, you will need to redact a new version of your thesis tailored for the repository upload, which will no longer include the copyrighted content. As the redaction must not significantly alter the content of your thesis, we recommend you contact us to discuss the most suitable options. 

If the removal of the copyrighted material from your electronic thesis compromises the integrity of the whole, it may be best to submit to the Library only the original, awarded version and request that the thesis be not made available online. This means you could either embargo your thesis or restrict the access to it . Please, discuss this with your supervisors before contacting the Library.

Embargoing your thesis

If you are planning to publish your thesis as a monograph or a series of articles with a commercial academic publisher, please discuss with your supervisors the opportunity to apply a temporary embargo to your thesis. If you have requested an embargo, the Library will not make your thesis publicly available until the embargo has elapsed. The embargo will also apply to the print copy of your thesis, which will be stored in a restricted area and will not be made available for consultation in situ .

If your thesis contains personal and/or sensitive data, or data that might endanger the national or individual security, you will need to permanently restrict the access to it. You will still be required to deposit your thesis to the Library, in both print and electronic format; however, your thesis will not be made available for consultation, or uploaded in our repository. If you have created or collected sensitive data, please contact the Research Data Management team to discuss the most suitable options for safely and securely store your data.

If your thesis contains third-party copyrighted material for which you failed to secure permission to reuse, and the removal of such material would compromise the integrity of your thesis, then you will need to restrict the access to it, until such permissions have become available to you. If you have been denied permission, then you might need to restrict the access to your thesis on a permanent basis.

Embargo and restriction of access requests must be submitted using the online form . Temporary embargoes can be applied for a period of either 1- or 5-year. Once your embargo has expired, you have the option to request a one-year extension. You can submit your extension request online .

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To speak to a member of the team, please email us using the address above to arrange a Teams call

Publisher Agreements

Information about 24 publisher agreements