[louprado]

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

[wenc]

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.

[skwb]

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.

[Fomite]

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

[euske]

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.

[currymj]

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.