When someone writes a doctoral thesis, is it supposed to be an completely original idea?

Question

Does it have to be checked out like a patent? Can your thesis be a based on another persons work/research?...like for example, filling in the blanks of another's work to find the cure for a disease?

Also, in the movie, The Core, the geophysicist and his grad students try to explain the weird occurences going on with the weather. At one point, he tells the students that if they help him figure it out, he will sign off on their thesises. Can he do that in real life?

Answer 1

The doctoral thesis (usually called a dissertation), is supposed to move knowledge forward in the field in a significant way. Very little innovation in the world is absolutely new - think new musical pieces, which are just new combinations of the same old notes which everyone uses, or companies like Starbucks, which didn't invent coffee, just packaged it in a new and, to some people, appealing way. The same is true of academic knowledge. Almost no one wakes up one day with thoughts based on nothing which will solve one of the world's major problems; they borrow from other areas and recombine existing knowledge in new ways. So yes, filling in the blanks of another's work, as long as it is significant (and certainly curing disease, if the previous author's work did not, would be significant) is one of the best ways of doing this.

By the way, every dissertation contains a major section called a literature review. In it, the student is expected to organize all of the relevant existing literature in such a way that it clarifies what the findings are so far and makes clear where the gaps are and how the student's dissertation will fill in those gaps.

As to the movie, the professor's statement would be considered unethical behavior. Graduate students working on dissertations have an entire committee to satisfy, although each has an advisor who heads up the committee. They work primarily with the advisor to develop the dissertation, but have to keep in mind the interests and concerns of other members of the committee along the way. When the advisor decides that the dissertation has been acceptably completed, a "defense" is scheduled; this is basically an oral exam given by the committee. The student presents the dissertation to the committee (who have already read it), and they then ask questions about it. If they feel that everything is okay, they will sign off on the dissertation. Often, however, there is an agreement that they will sign off when certain changes have been made to address their concerns. On occasion, it will become apparent that the student's understanding of the subject matter is not deep enough to satisfy all, or some, of the committee members, and that student fails the defense (I haven't seen this happen often, since it is seen as much as a failure of the advisor as it is of the student. It seems to happen more with older students who are convinced that they know more than their advisors and who schedule their defenses against the wishes of their advisors). In this kind of a setting, even if the advisor were to sign off on the dissertation for inappropriate reasons (like their achievements on something other than the dissertation itself), the student would still have to answer to the committee, so the advisor's signature would be relatively meaningless.

Answer 2

Yes, it's supposed to contain some original research. It's up to your adviser and you to research the field and make sure you're not repeating someone else's work. You can continue someone else's work, but you have to contribute something to it.

Yes, once your adviser signs off on your thesis, you're done. The university trusts them to know that it's original work that you've done yourself. But if anyone find out it wasn't, you're both in trouble; you could lose your job over that. I didn't see The Core, but the geophysicist probably meant that he'd stop making them revise their manuscripts and would just accept it was it was.

Oh, it looks like you misunderstood what 'signing off' on the thesis meant. It doesn't mean you don't have to write it. When your adviser signs off on it, he's approved it and you've defended it and you've graduated. You still have to write and defend it. You can't get out of that.

Answer 3

Doctoral research is supposed to be some what original. You have to use your own proposal not someone elses.

A thesis is done for a masters. As for signing off on there thesis, I have no idea if it could be done in real life - I'm not sure what it means. If it means "pass without review", its unethical.

Answer 4

There are some who call themselves scientists who've written issues they have tried to bypass off as doctoral theses. regrettably, none of them have been smart sufficient to stay to tell the story the peer evaluation technique. @Forgiven490 Isaac Newton lived at a time while the existence of god grow to be at once assumed. Had he lived 3 hundred years later, his ideals could have replaced with the upward thrust in scientific advice available to him. it quite is a undeniable guess he could now not be a creationist.