Hacker News Reader

Comment by louprado | Hacker News Reader

A bit of a tangent, but does anyone know if a "paper PhD" is still and option ? The first and only time I ever heard of it was during a lecture by Nobel laureate Dr. Shuji Nakamura[1].

IIRC, the University of Florida offered PhD's if you published 5 papers which he did in one year.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUlR9DP6Me4&t=2074s

View on HN

It’s called a “sandwich thesis” and it’s quite common in some countries, mostly in Europe. Put together a few papers published in peer reviewed journals, write a introduction, and submit it for defense.

It's fairly common at my university. You publish 3 papers surrounding a singular theme or topic and you use that for your PhD. You still need to write an intro and have some boilerplate stuff, but it's not uncommon at all.

The so-called "Sandwich Thesis" is the default in my field. At this point, doing something else is genuinely strange.

Although the number is shrinking, it's still a thing in Japan (so-called "ronpaku"). It is generally said that the thesis by a paper PhD must be better than those regular PhDs who completed courseworks, but it's much more efficient. If your thesis is already complete, you can get a degree in less than a year.

some programs are happy to just have you tack a bunch of papers together into a dissertation. they usually still require you to write the actual document, though, re-explaining the work in each paper.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com