What has led you to believe this is so? Is it your own opinion or do you have some outside evidence? For example, has your supervisor expressed concern that the topic is not working out as well as you both thought it should? Is it because you are reading published material in this area and going to conferences and you've discovered others are doing work in the same field which seems much more important? In other words, you need to make sure your impression is more than just the usual doldrums of the middle years of being a doctoral student. Sometimes we begin a PhD wanting to excite the world but, when we get down to it, what we actually do is, like most things, 90 percent routine and our results appear very pedestrian to us. What you're working on and have now achieved become so familiar and simple to you that you start assuming that everyone knows it. This could lead you to underestimate the value of your work. Sometimes it is a matter of looking at the results in a different way and possibly finding another way of exploring or packaging what you've found to underscore its significance. However it is possible that indeed there isn't enough in your results. You and your supervisor then have to look at it from all angles. Work out if it is just a case where more research is needed in the same area to give it depth. Perhaps you even have to discard some aspects of the topic and to focus and concentrate on a more specific area. This could, of course, require further reading, planning or experiments. Or perhaps you need to broaden the scope. In this case, you might reconsider some of the aspects you originally discarded which are related. For example, one student experimenting with a simple treatment for a common plant poisoning in animals found this treatment not to be as useful as anticipated and therefore she devised investigations of other treatments. In the course of this, she also found that there were crucial details of the signs not previously written up. It is often useful to cast the net a bit wider to give your argument further support, or a comparative focus, for example. The caution here is that you must remember the whole thesis has to be unified and not a loose collection of bits and pieces. It could be a good idea for you to recall why you thought it was a worthwhile project in the first place and revisit the literature which led you to believe this line of enquiry would be fruitful. Perhaps then a major contribution of your work might be to offer a more thorough critical analysis of this very literature and use your results as evidence to argue that the approach or line of enquiry suggested in the literature yields little. For example, your empirical research could reveal the flaws in a particular model or theoretical framework you've adopted. So, changing the focus by narrowing, broadening, foregrounding the marginal, re-examining the results, or by changing the emphasis from results to the theory could all rescue, and even improve, your thesis.

	Taking stock of where you are.
	Wrestling with the idea of making an original contribution.
	How do I know if I have done enough, or if my work is good enough for a PhD?
	Now I see how I should have done it all along. Is it too late to change?