I've discovered a doctoral dissertation, but of the eight chapters, I only want to cite Ch I, III, and VII. Do I need to indicate that I only reviewed a specific subset of the dissertation? And if yes, then how do I do it?
Since one person wrote the dissertation, you don't need to break out the chapters because your in-text citations will point people to the relevant sections of the text. Accordingly, you only need to reference the dissertation, versus referencing specific chapters within the dissertation.