I don't have a great deal of experience reading non-Swedish dissertations,
so it is hard to compare.
A PhD in Sweden can be based upon different kinds of publications, sets of
articles or sets of reports-with-an-integration or a monography. What is
the dominant custom varies a lot with the discipline, I think. The way
things are, however I think that the formally allotted time of four years
for taking the "doctoral exam" is very seldom enough in the humanities and
social sciences. Whereas it may be in the natural sciences. I think there
is actually too little attention paid to dissertation writing AS research.
As if the proper way was to "do your study", "do your analysis" and then
"write it up". And then people spend these incredible amounts of time,
effort and agony on writing, and run way out of the allotted time -- the
system does not guillotine you out of trying after four years, but it puts
you under the strain of somehow making a living while struggling towards
completion.
For my part I have been very fortunate, first to have made my "empirical
study" during the first of my five years (four, diluted by some other work)
as it was basically an outcropping of the project I had been employed on
the years before getting into the scholarship program (yes, this is a bit
of doing things like the serious study of the Literature backwards). Second
by being able to go back into project employment (People who go into
teaching may take eight or ten years to finish -- some do, but of course
many give up) now that my five years have expired (yes, I've been writing
for that long! Well, the first finished chapter I did in the summer of
-93... before that transcriptions, analysis, paper writing). And third I
have been fortunate by being able to shape the genre to my own purposes --
thinking of "it" as a sculpture or novel, while still being able to coat it
well enough into a likeness of what is "generically" acceptable...
By the way, I was recently informed over our local net by a colleague
(evidently it happened to her) that if you submit an article to a journal
electronically, i.e. over the Internet they count it as "published
material" and refuse to take account of it. Is that common practice?
Eva