jdwhitfield/shipofthesis

A database of PhD theses.

Ship of Thesis

FAQ | Resources | How tos

The idea of PhD is to push the boundary of the human knowledge. Few years are spent doing the research and the findings are documented in a dissertation/PhD thesis. At the end of the PhD, thesis becomes a static document, holding the essence of someone's research during their PhD. Further, many of the databases of PhD theses are paywalled. And these are the two big motivations for this project, the Ship of Thesis. Though, a long list of the reasons is given below.

The idea!

Here, we aim to create a central and crowd-sourced database of PhD theses. The author of the thesis will create a github repository with their thesis and supplementary material. The details of the thesis and the link to the github repository could then be submitted to this repository. We encourage especially the people who are starting to write their thesis to submit the details. This could help them get real-time feedback from the community. But, please be cognizant of how much help you are taking from the community and make sure to acknowledge people providing feedback appropriately. %The details for submission are presented here.

Motivations for the Ship of Thesis.

• Clickety stuff The thesis is a static document on so many levels. One of which is, there is absolutely no links except for the internal links to equations and references. By having a github repository, you can have direct links to the articles you are referring. Plus, you can include links to both the arxiv version and the published version.
• Animations This is a continuation of the above point. Now, your thesis lives on github, which means you can make your thesis interactive. No more boring graphs and static picture. You could have animations and widgets. Infact, you could have a jupyter notebook version of your thesis.
• Crowd sourcing Animations, hyperlinks and generating an interactive version of the thesis are all great features, but one may not be familiar with the techniques required to provide such features. Enter crowd sourcing. As the author, you do not need to provide all these features yourself. If there are people who liked your thesis and have read it, they may do it for you. And it does not have to restricted to the feature addition, someone may like your thesis but update a section to read much better. Or they may add additional notes that could be of importance to other people. All the would need to do is just fork a repository, update and do a pull request. In return, please be sure to put them in acknowledgement.
• Time evolution The biggest benefit of putting a repository on github is that it becomes a constantly evolving document. The changes could be as minimal as errata or could be where the new document hardly remembers the original document. With github, all the different versions are available, anyone interested could look up a version from any given time.
• Forward and backward references References lists the previous works on which the current work builds. If the work was completed 20 years ago, then there is a good chance that people built on this work. With the constant evolution of the thesis, forward references section could be a great way to include the works that builds on the work in the thesis.
• Open questions The open section could be a chapter in the thesis or could be a separate document in the repository that gets updated as and when people or you yourself conquer the new unknowns.
• Thesis for layman The github version could also contains the unpolished version with lot more details which would help people from outside the field read with less effort.

FAQs:

Q. I don't know how to use git, what do I do?
A. Ah, no worries! Git is this wonderful tool that does not take much time to learn. We have put together a small tutorial here that should teach you just enough git for shipofthesis. But, we would highly recommend you to learn more. Links to more resources in are in the tutorial itself
Q. I have my thesis on overleaf, how can I connect overleaf and github?
A. Here
Q. Can I contribute to this 'Ship of Thesis'?
A. Here