OT: Q about PhD

[CNY rider]

Question for the PhD folks out there. This regards a work associate who I suspect is, shall we say, gilding the lily regarding their educational achievements.

The PhD scientists I've worked with have all written Doctoral theses. They're all involved in the biological sciences, so i don't know if their experience generalizes to other fields. Many have had at least part of their thesis published in a scholarly journal, and they can be found on a literature search.

Do PhD candidates in other areas of study (let's just randomly pick Healthcare Management, for kicks) also write a thesis? Would it generally be available for public review, either after publication or through their degree granting institution? Thanks.

[swoop]

my masters thesis and doctoral dissertation are not available for public review. that being said.. they were case studies and not research oriented.
being published is not an inherent part of being awarded a doctorate.

being sexy is...

[Fat Robert]

depends

a chunk of my diss was published -- but its still crap

in the humanities, at least, if you can't get something from your diss published, it probably stinks. as djg has noted, there are a lot of stinkers out there....

[manet]

art historians _ yes.

[dbrk]

It is a common feature of Universities to archive their doctoral theses, though some are classified or involve patent information that is not public. However, it is possible to verify the work as fulfilling the requirements set forth by the University. The way things go at Chicago, Harvard, Princeton, and nearly every other place is similar but not standardized. In nearly all cases in the humanities, a doctoral thesis is both required and publicly available, either through the awarding University or UMI, which provides hard copies in their extensive archive. One can, for example, order a copy of my own dissertation (Harvard, 1987) from UMI. My own dissertation was never published as a single work, except as a dissertation, but some 80% appears in two subsequent books (The Secret of the Three Cities, UChicago Press, 1990 and Auspicious Wisdom, SUNY Press, 1992). I would say this is not atypical, at least in the humanities.

dbrk

[11.4]

In most fields there's a written requirement, even in areas such as performance music. Healthcare management typically has a thesis, even if it's a body of work describing, say, a healthcare organization or financial systems implementation that's packaged with a brief into and postscript. There are areas where the thesis is not accessible -- work involving classified research, for example.

The bottom line is that if a thesis is required, someone doesn't actually get a degree without completing and submitting it. You can go online at many universities and search for the individual. You usually need a social security number, but at my alma mater even that isn't necessary. The metric on whether they've done the work is whether they have the degree.

[pale scotsman]

I've worked with a guy who had a phd in Healthcare Informatics. Who the heck would want to read a thesis in that field! ;) Not too sure if his was published, but a lot of his research was. I'll bet a dollar that if you type in the persons name, school, and degree in google, something is going to come up.

BTW people fake stuff all the time. We had a director of nursing that falsified her BSN and MS degrees to get the job. Turned out all she had was a 2 year RN degree. She was slick and highly recommended. When she was outed years later it was bad, real bad.

[CNY rider]

I appreciate all the good information.

Pale Scot, I can see something like that barreling down the tracks if I can connect a few more dots.....

[djg]

As has been pointed out, (a) it is common for schools to archive (and file, as searchable holdings, in one or more of their libraries), dissertations which they accept as doctoral theses, and (b) Michigan has a million of these things. Contacting either ought to do it. In any case, a University awarding a degree ought to be able to confirm that degree.

Of course, even a fairly obscure dissertation that is not published, either in whole or in part, ought to be cited somewhere or other. If so, some appropriate search engine ought to turn up the citation. Still, I guess there's no guarantee of that.

Good luck.

[JanG]

At the time I got my doctorate from the large vo-tech further downriver from dbrk's institution, I was led to believe that a dissertation was part of any engineering Ph.D. While perhaps not strictly a requirement, producing a dissertation that does not contain publishable material seems almost a contradiction in terms.