When I was doing my PhD, someone at some stage asked me (probably in response to my ramblings about what my PhD was about): ‘what is your “golden thread”?’ This stumped me. My what? I hadn’t really heard that term before, although my supervisor has talked about it since, as have other colleagues who all supervise students – it seems to be a fairly common notion then, this notion of a ‘golden thread’ with which you can ‘sew’ your PhD thesis together. But what, indeed, is a golden thread, where do you get one, and how do you work out how to sew your PhD together?

To begin with what it is: the golden thread is, for want of a better explanation, the central argument that pulls through your whole thesis, and creates coherence across the literature review, the research questions, the theoretical and conceptual framework, the methodology, and finally the analysis and organisation of the data and the conclusions you are able to draw (on the basis of that argument you set out to make). It sounds quite straightforward when it is put like this, but in my experience (and in the experience of many other PhD students) it is really difficult to find and hold onto over the long course of researching and writing a PhD thesis. Another way of thinking about it would be to keep reminding yourself about what the point of your PhD is. What is it actually about – what are you trying to say here? A friend of mine types her main research question into the header of each page she works on in each of her chapters, so that she is not tempted to go off track in her writing and thinking; another friend wrote a haiku about the main point her PhD was making, and stuck it in a place she could see it when she was writing; another wrote her research questions on several sticky notes and put them above her desk at work and her desk at home, so that she had them in front of her whenever she was working on the thesis. I kept a fairly faithful research journal, and re-read it often, to remind myself what I was actually making my argument about.

So, how do you get one? Sadly, you cannot go to PhDarguments.com and order one; you have to make or build one, and this takes time and is really challenging. I think of it a bit like Rumpelstiltskin turning all the straw into golden thread (except without all the creepiness). What you have when you start a PhD is straw – ideas, concepts, theory, methods, questions, literature you have read – and you have to pull the right pieces of straw together to make a strong, shiny length of golden thread that you can then use to sew a beautifully coherent and persuasive PhD thesis. Like theoretical frameworks, analytical frameworks, literature reviews, an argument is built part by part and always in relation to the main question it is being made to answer. There are key parts of the thesis that you need to put into place as you go to help you create strong and coherent sub-arguments that build towards the overall, central argument your PhD will make.

You need to scope your field well, and find a gap into which your research could fit – this helps you to start asking more refined questions, which can turn into research questions. You need to move from this reading into tougher theoretical and conceptual territory – you need to find your theoryology, and with it, further refinement and focus of your research questions. You need then to consider how you will answer these questions: what data will you need? How will you find it? What will you do with it in order to make sense out of it, and select what is relevant to analyse in relation to your research questions? Then you need to further consider the research questions you are trying to answer as you connect the theory with the data in the process of analysing it, and using it to tell the story that answers your questions, and explains why both the questions and the answers are important to your readers, and your research community or field. Following a logical and coherent process, and pulling each part of the process through with you into the subsequent stage or part of the process, really helps. In other words, don’t leave all your theory and research questions behind when you plan out your methodology and generate your data. Don’t forget the scoping of the field you have done, the research questions you are asking, and your theoretical framework and conceptual tools when you organise and begin to analyse that data in order to build your strong, shiny argument.

The argument, in the end, is the thing with the PhD. You cannot have your readers get to the end of it wondering: ‘So what? Why did I just read all of that? What was the point?’ The golden thread is just that: the answer to the ‘so what’ question; the point of the research; the central argument you have made on the basis of the research you have done. Without it you don’t have a PhD thesis; you have parts of a whole that has not been realised or pulled together. In order to sew those parts into something that represents what Trafford and Leshem have termed ‘doctorateness’, you need to channel Rumpelstiltskin, and start turning all your straw into your own golden thread, so that you can sew the parts of your research into a coherent, persuasive, strong PhD thesis.