Mapping the De Facto Consensus on Doctoral Dissertation Requirements: A Content Analysis of Published Dissertation Guides Across Four High-Volume U.S. Doctoral Fields

U.S. doctoral programs publish dissertation guides that operationally define what a completed dissertation should contain, yet the field lacks an aggregated, cross-institutional description of what those guides actually document. Using a frozen 43-criterion codebook, this study catalogs the criteria specified within each major dissertation section (Introduction, Literature Review, Method, Results, and Discussion) in published guides, records whether each criterion is mandated or recommended, and computes the prevalence of each criterion across the guides that specify chapter content, distinguishing these content guides from formatting-only guides that prescribe layout but no required content. The analysis is scoped to four high-volume applied and professional doctoral fields: education, nursing, business, and psychology. This version of the study enforces a strict replicability standard. Every guide in the corpus passed a two-step verification: a live URL check confirming that the document exists at a public institutional address, followed by a fresh fetch in which the document text itself was read and coded. Guides whose text could not be retrieved were excluded and logged rather than coded from secondary evidence. The resulting corpus comprises 55 verified content guides from 55 institutions. Coding was AI-assisted and evidence-locked, with the mandating language recorded per chapter; an independent recode of a stratified subsample agreed with the primary coding on 82.1 percent of criterion decisions exactly and on 93.8 percent of documented-versus-absent decisions. Three findings organize the results. First, the documented consensus is thinner than archetype-based accounts suggest: no criterion is mandated by ninety percent of guides, and only a five-element spine (problem statement, human-subjects protection, study design with rationale, research questions, and data-collection procedures) is required by a majority. Second, guides describe far more than they mandate; most named elements appear as suggested structure rather than binding requirement, and that gap between description and mandate is itself a central finding. Third, within education, the one field retaining a viable vetted comparator, practice and research doctorates differ modestly and not always in the expected direction. A central caveat frames all three: the study measures what programs publicly document, not what committees enforce. The consensus map and its exclusion log are offered as a replicable empirical baseline for the objective, comparable evidence of doctoral competency that accreditation standards contemplate, including the agenda of the Accreditation, Innovation, and Modernization (AIM) negotiated rulemaking.