Steve Tippins Ph.D.Helping doctoral students get their dissertation accepted, succeed in their careers, & change the world | Academic Career Advisor | Dissertation Chair & Founder, Beyond PhD Coaching | 35 + years of experience.

Can Someone Replicate This?

19 Oct 2026 · 1 min

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In this brief advisory segment, the speaker stresses that a proposal defense methodology slide must go beyond terse bullet points. It should fully describe the research procedures so that committee members—and any future researcher—could replicate the study. The speaker argues that without sufficient detail, the work appears as "magic" and cannot be verified, undermining confidence in the results.

Chapters

When you're on your proposal defense, your methodology slide is, you know, bullet points of your methodology. Your methodology is the process that you're going to go through, but you also want to remember your committee thinks, can someone replicate this? So that means your methodology has to be sufficiently explained so that others can replicate it if they ever want to redo your study. If it can't be replicated, how do we know you did it right? How can anybody check on this? Or was it just magic?