{"id":3261,"date":"2008-12-30T09:01:40","date_gmt":"2008-12-30T09:01:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/12\/30\/what-makes-a-dissertation\/"},"modified":"2008-12-30T09:01:40","modified_gmt":"2008-12-30T09:01:40","slug":"what-makes-a-dissertation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/12\/30\/what-makes-a-dissertation\/","title":{"rendered":"What Makes a Dissertation?"},"content":{"rendered":"

ScienceWoman has a post about plans and publications<\/a> that opens with a comment about what makes a dissertation that struck me as odd:<\/p>\n

\n

Three papers, an introductory chapter and some broad conclusions. Those are the ingredients of a Ph.D. dissertation in it’s simplest form.<\/p>\n

[…]My first PhD paper was published in 2006, shortly after I defended. The second paper came out earlier this year. The third paper goes back to the editors on Monday, at the end of what hopefully is its last ever set of revisions. If all goes well, the editors give it their blessing and we move on to proofs and publication.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The odd thing about this is not the content– that’s about right. The odd thing is the timing– her first paper from her Ph.D. work wasn’t published until after<\/strong> she defended.<\/p>\n

That’s a big difference from my experience. Five of the six papers from my grad school experiments<\/a> were published before I defended, and the sixth was on a completely different topic. In fact, the five papers are included as appendices in the final copies of my dissertation. <\/p>\n

I don’t think I know of anybody in my field who has gotten a Ph.D. without publishing first. If they did, they definitely didn’t have my committee– the copies of the dissertation that I gave to the committee members didn’t include the published papers, and through a gross oversight on my part, they didn’t cite the papers, either. One of the committee members held the defense up for ten minutes because he thought I hadn’t published, and found it absurd that we would even try to hold a defense under those conditions.<\/p>\n

I suspect this is a disciplinary difference, but I wonder how general it is. If you happen to be reading this (unlikely, given the date, but I can hope), and have some knowledge of Ph.D. requirements in different fields, drop me a comment. Is my experience in physics anomalous? Is “defense first, then publication” the usual rule in other fields? Which ones?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ScienceWoman has a post about plans and publications that opens with a comment about what makes a dissertation that struck me as odd: Three papers, an introductory chapter and some broad conclusions. Those are the ingredients of a Ph.D. dissertation in it’s simplest form. […]My first PhD paper was published in 2006, shortly after I… Continue reading What Makes a Dissertation?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3261"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3261\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}