Great. I’m historic. Or at least antique.
I used to do much the same thing when running my experiments late into the night in grad school. I didn’t like leaving them on their own for hours – I wanted to keep watch in case something went off the rails (as it always seemed to do if I wasn’t around). So while watching my crystal growth apparatus slowly “pull” out a crystal by Czochralsky, or while my intricate laser setup was s-l-o-w-l-y taking a spectrum of a tiny signal filtered through a lock-in-amplifier, I’d be sitting there shepherding it while going through a stack of Scientific Americans or American Journal of Physics or whatever else I grabbed out of the physics library.
It was useful preparation for editing for the OSA much later. I’m convinced that this is how Jearl D. Walker came up with his book The Flying Circus of Physics.
And the way Schenkman came up with Legends, Lies, and Cherished Myths of American History.
Where I went to college all EE students had to do a bachelor’s thesis. Mine was the design of a board for an interferometer for a radio telescope project. I guess it maybe could have contributed to the field. Certainly wasn’t publishable. We did have to “defend” our work in front of a group of professors.
My PhD thesis (and all others I knew of) went to some place in Michigan to be collected and published in the sense that they would make copies. This was way pre-Internet. I wonder if this is still a thing - seems kind of pointless now. My good publications weren’t about my dissertation work, though I did publish in some conferences. I went into industry but if I worked in academics I could no doubt publish it somewhere good.
Best Master’s thesis I know of was Claude Shannon’s, which basically invented digital electronics.
That would be the formerly named University Microfilms, now called ProQuest*, mentioned previously.
Supposedly, you’d get royalties on copies of your thesis they send out. I know someone who got something like 40 cents once. I never got a dime nor can I see how they’d know where to send the money in most cases.
- “ProQuest, because we thought an unhelpful name would be a good idea.”
Around here, Batchelor’s should include only a summation of current accepted state of the art.
Advancement/innovation is not required, indeed is actively discouraged! Attaining Batchelors level means you learn the current knowledge of a field, and have to show that you can apply this knowledge in real-world applications.
Nothing publishable!
At Masters, you need to show a working knowledge of the borders of your field, and do some work in extending those borders, or at least testing them more thoroughly than has been done before.
Work is published, but is usually in the form of “supporting data for xxxx” or “further examination of the behaviour of xxxx system under yyyy conditions”
At Doctorate level, you have to open up new borders of the field, or greatly improve knowledge of a poorly-explored border.
Work is absolutely published, and needs to be original in either content or scope. Formal rules about layout, content, references, and review apply.
In those antique “pre-internet” days, University Microfilms was a great way to get concentrated research. I used to buy stuff from them quite a bit, not just in physics, but when researching historical articles and suchlike as well.
That’s also what my university requires of me (I’m currently in the process of preparing the publication of my PhD dissertation). It’s standard among German universities to require publication of doctoral dissertation, either as a prerequisite for the award of the degree, or as a cause for possible revocation if the publication does not occur within a set period after the award. I understand that German academia is a bit unusual in international comparison in making this a universal requirement, though. It has led to the creation of a - by now well-established - kind of academic vanity press in this country: Publishing dissertations online on university servers is free and now widely used, but the traditional way is still to publish a PhD thesis as a monograph in the form of a bound book. Of course the number of people buying a copy of that is rather low, and so the brand new PhDs need to subsidise the book by means of a lump payment to the publishing house. It feels quite like a rip-off, but it’s still the old-school and more prestigious way of doing it.
“Publishing” the intact thesis is different from publishing the work in journal articles.
As noted, in the US generally a copy of the thesis is sent to whatever University Microfilms calls itself today and most likely another copy to the university library. Departments like to have a copy, too. That counts as publishing in my mind but not at all the same as converting the chapters into articles.