What’s the most famous PhD dissertation paper? Is there such a thing?

Factual Questions
21

I immediately thought of “that infamously short particle physics paper in the early 1900’s”, although I confess in my feeble memory it was Heisenberg who had the famously short paper. Geezing.

In modern times, the most notorious one that comes to mind is Martin Luther King’s thesis, which achieved that notoriety over plagiarized content. I don’t know if that counts as being “famous” or not.

As Kimstu notes, most dissertations are resigned to dusty shelves. In part this is because they do not involve fabulous ground-breaking insights; they are part of the process for obtaining the Piled higher and Deeper. If a student in higher education discovers something really spectacular, you can bet their supervising professor is gonna publish it as an active paper with her name listed first. It ain’t gonna make the dissertation as a primary discovery.

22

Chief Pedant’s cynicism works its magic again.

That’s an insightful comment and something I overlooked. Totally makes sense.

But Pandora’s box is opened and I’m now curious what the most famous example of an advisor stealing credit from a student would be. Off to google land…

23

I pretend no expertise, but if this is De Broglie’s thesis, it’s about 70 pages…

http://www.nonloco-physics.000freehosting.com/ldb_the.pdf

24

Ouch.
Kimstu, help! Rescue me!

Perhaps we can get another PhD paper: “Kimstu agreed with CP”

(Not about MLK; about the advisor taking credit if a student discovers something spectacular. No way is that student’s name going first…)

Ever heard of PRE? Me neither. But EPR is in any physics history book.

25

Wait a minute. This may be the case in some experimental sciences where few if any single-author works are ever published, but it’s absurd (bordering on slanderous) to suggest that outstanding dissertation research in every field would automatically be co-opted by a dissertation advisor.

There have been many brilliant Ph.D. students who published spectacular results from their dissertations solely under their own names, including the dissertation authors mentioned upthread.

26

This might not really fit the OP for a couple reasons (the theory is not that important to non-academics, major points were republished) but Noam Chomsky’s dissertation, “Transformational Analysis,” revolutionized linguistics. It was republished in Syntactic Structure and The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory.

27

I dunno about famous examples, but there was a lawsuit alleging such conduct in Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies in Johnson v. Schmitz (.doc).

28

I’ve been waiting years for this: cite? :slight_smile:

Mr CP the Cynic holds to his scandalous, slanderous view, the outstanding (and quite a bit smarter) Kimstu’s (naive :wink: ) opinion to the contrary:

No way an outstanding discovery from a PhD candidate (in modern times) gets published first as a dissertation anymore and no way an outstanding (Nobel-level…genius-level) discovery gets published with the student-author’s name as the only (or even primary) author.
In the academic world, which is much more scandalous than you think, publishing is everything and first-author credit is most of the credit. You aren’t alive until you are published, and you aren’t gonna get first-author published on sumpin’ really really good til you earn your PhD, if you are working toward a degree.

OK, maybe every once in a great while, but no way, on average…Damn Kimstu hates me so bad…

29

Sorry, but this is nuts. Students in many fields do retain independent control over their own research results and don’t get them stolen by their advisors, even if the results are brilliant. Demanding that the results be restricted to “Nobel-level” discoveries seems unrealistic—how many graduate students do Nobel-level research, with or without co-authors?—but genius-level discoveries certainly are published independently by Ph.D. candidates.

I’m thinking in particular of the outstanding Fields Medalist mathematician Terence Tao, who published several major papers (with no co-authors) before and shortly after receiving his Ph.D. in 1996, and to a lesser extent another mathematician, Manjul Bhargava, with similar though not quite as renowned accomplishments.

“On average”, grad students aren’t doing genius-level work, period. IME, the few who do achieve that tend to have advisors who are inordinately proud of them and run around showing them off every chance they get and push them to accomplish even more stunning things, not jealous losers who steal from them.

Frankly, AFAICT, a truly genius-level hotshot grad student whose advisor doesn’t support him/her with integrity has plenty of opportunities to find another advisor. Students like Tao and Bhargava generally acquire quite a reputation informally among specialists in their fields even before they begin to publish, and they usually have some fairly hotshot senior geniuses who are eager to work with them. Stealing credit from a student of that caliber would be likely to cause quite a scandal in the profession.

My guess (and this, unlike the specific examples of individual cases offered above, is only a guess) about the “plagiarized-by-advisor” phenomenon in general would be that it shows up primarily among comparatively mediocre professors with good-but-not-great students, where the people involved have no academic celebrity status and comparatively little collegial scrutiny, so intellectual theft is more likely to pass unnoticed.

In the academic world, where I’ve worked in both humanities and sciences departments for the past twenty years and which is much more diverse and complex than you apparently realize, there are lots of different social models of competition and collaboration. It is simply not true that every academic department is a seething abattoir of backstabbing and throatcutting in the struggle for publishing credit, nor is it true that every academic will abandon all loyalty and integrity for the sake of getting their name on a genius-level publication.

Your boasted scandalous slanderous cynicism may be personally titillating to you, but that doesn’t make it an accurate picture of all academia.

30

I dunno…if you have to reach back a decade to get a couple of really smart exceptions in your own field, I’m tempted to stick with my boasted scandalous slanderous (bit touchy, aren’t we…slander?) cynical generalization about academia. And obviously my tongue is in my cheek. I realize you are all lovely people, anxious to advance the other guy’s career.

Those two guys were obviously pretty good genetic stock when they showed up to play, so I’m happy to admit they could get their own names on a paper. But in my opinion, they still represent the exception and not the rule. You have, of course, convinced me that altruism reigns supreme in academia.

p.s. : Thanks for “abbattoir.” I will be pretending I knew it all along.

31

I read somewhere that many big breakthroughs in science have come when the person was under the age of 40 .

32

Consider: Many professors do, in fact, have integrity, and I’ve known several who have a policy that all work done in collaboration with a student of theirs gets published with the student’s name first. If we assume that the true geniuses among the graduate student population are evenly distributed amongst professors, then surely at least a few would end up under such professors. In fact, such professors tend to get a good reputation among students, and therefore tend to have more students than average.

This, generally, is true. Any work sufficient to be published as a thesis is also sufficient for a half-dozen journal papers or so, and most folks will not want to sit on something they could publish while they accumulate more work in the field. In practice, the set of papers the student publishes end up being a sort of rough draft for the thesis.

33

I’ve never seen it. I’m sure it happens, but I’ve never seen it in chemistry.

34

Rita Levi-Montalcini (Nobelist in ‘Physiology or Medicine’) insisted that her one and only graduate student publish her (the student’s) seminal paper without Levi-Montalcini even being a co-author (ironically, the cite for this is in the today’s issue of Nature which I cannot link to).

ETA: For those interested, I just find another site for the cite (2/3 through the page).

35

Because sometimes it isn’t so obvious.

36

Note that Tao and Bhargava are not extremely exceptional in authoring independent research papers before they obtained their Ph.D.'s. Hell, even I had written an independent research paper before I had my Ph.D. (although I didn’t get it accepted for publication until the following year), and I am not by any stretch of the imagination a genius.

Where people like Tao and Bhargava are extreme outliers is in the exceptional brilliance of their work. (Tao in particular, as one of the youngest mathematicians ever to receive the Nobel-equivalent Fields Medal, is by anybody’s standards one of the top people in the entire discipline.) But if you’re asking about people who were merely talented enough to produce publishable work during their Ph.D. candidacy and succeeded in publishing it on their own, that’s a much less rare situation.

I’d estimate that somewhere around 5-10% of graduate students in pure mathematics (and more in my own field, which is related but less technically difficult) have single-authored research papers appearing in print before their Ph.D. is actually awarded, and many more get their dissertation research out under their own names within a year of receiving the degree. As Chronos notes, if it’s publishable-quality work then there’s no reason to hold off on publishing it.

:rolleyes: Yes, because of course we all know that there can never be any intermediate truth between two extreme hypotheses. Since it’s false to state categorically that there’s no way a genius-level result could be published independently by a Ph.D. candidate rather than being co-opted by the candidate’s advisor, then it must be true that all advisors are selfless altruists whose only goal is to advance the other guy’s career.

How interesting it must be to live in Chief Pedant Land, where every day brings either a multimillion-dollar lottery win at a sumptuous luxury resort or else a devastating automobile accident coinciding with bankruptcy. Sounds a little too exciting for me, though.

Good, because if that’s the way you’re going to spell it I would hate to have people think you picked it up from me. :wink:

37

But they left Stanford before finishing their PhDs, right? Not that it held them back or anything…

38

I wasn’t counting on google to unearth the dissertations themselves.

I was thinking of something indirect. For example, maybe somebody compiled a list of “Top 10 PhD Dissertations of all time.” Or when reading various websites with guidelines to writing a quality thesis, some might point to a seminal paper that everybody knows of as a shining example of what to emulate. Edward Gibbons “Decline and Fall of Roman Empire” serve as a common frame of reference for historical writing but no PhD work (so far) seems to have risen above the pack transcending its academic origins.

I’m beginning to believe this is simply an accident of history and 200 years is too short a time (too small a sample size) for any such works to become known (at least superficially) by the general public. Somehow the equation e=mc^2 escaped the boundaries of academia and made it into public consciousness even though most don’t understand what it means. I do find it hard to believe that there isn’t single original quote embedded in any PhD dissertation that’s regurgitated by the public today? How many phrases have been put to paper in the last 200 years of dissertations? Millions? Not a single one leaped off any dissertation that we use as a cliche today?

39

Again, the crux of the matter is that most material embedded in any Ph.D. thesis doesn’t generally reach the public via the Ph.D. thesis itself.

Yes, you could go through a list of popular memes derived from science and scholarship, and look up the Ph.D. theses written by those memes’ originators, and I’m sure that in many cases you’d find that the meme first appeared in the thesis. But since the primary mechanism for disseminating the meme was some piece of published research rather than the Ph.D. dissertation, the dissertation itself is likely to remain obscure, no matter how famous the meme or the author is.

40

Yes, I understand that barrier. I’m not expecting raw PhD dissertations to sit on the shelves at Barnes & Noble or for Kindle download at amazon.com.

But somehow, Plato’s writings survived through the centuries (passing through Persians and Arabs) even though there was no Journal of Philosophy (or no Gutenberg printing press for that matter) to publish (broaden its appeal).

I guess it seemed strange that no PhD work in 200 years was so groundbreaking that it leaked out into the public sphere and didn’t need (didn’t wait) to be reformatted by a publisher.