[DrScientist]

Most thesis are never read because anything worth sharing with the wider world ( and some that isn't ) is highly likely to have been published as a paper - not because the work in thesis has no value.

The whole point of a PhD is not to create a thesis - that's just a mechanism to measure - it's to be trained as a scientist or researcher.

Doing a degree in chemistry for example, is largely a knowledge building phase - and in my view it doesn't make you a scientist - being a scientist is about discovering new things about the world that nobody else has - ever - that's what you are learning how to do when doing a PhD.

[acdha]

> Most thesis are never read because anything worth sharing with the wider world ( and some that isn't ) is highly likely to have been published as a paper - not because the work in thesis has no value.

Yes - my wife’s advisor literally told her that the goal should be getting as close as you could to stapling your published papers together with an introduction. They saw this as recognizing that you had learned how to ask good questions, run experiments, and iterate on the results — and since their field had fairly expensive overhead requirements everyone was mindful of the need to repeatedly get grants to keep the experiments running.

[DrScientist]

> Yes - my wife’s advisor literally told her that the goal should be getting as close as you could to stapling your published papers together with an introduction.

Indeed - in fact some countries ( I think Scandinavian ) do exactly this - the equivalent to a thesis is simply your publications.

Has it's Pro's and cons - you can learn a lot as a scientist but be unlucky in not having an publishable results ( as the answers to your scientific questions were either 'no' [1] or somebody scooped you ).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...