Credit with helping to write a PhD thesis

Question

I am an undergraduate student doing summer research and I am helping a PhD student to write a portion of her PhD thesis and with a bit of editing here and there. I am wondering how would credit be distributed since I don't think a PhD thesis can be co-authored. Also, when I apply to graduate school afterwards, how would I show the admission committee that I have done this work?

To clarify: I had two kinds of contributions to this thesis. There are parts describing research we collaborated on, but it was mainly me in that I collected the data and performed the analysis but she gave me advice. There are also parts that describe her research, that I helped to edit.

Answer 1

In some fields, almost all work is done as a collaboration. In these fields, it is not at all unusual for this collaborative work to end up in a student's thesis. However, the thesis text should clearly state "This chapter describes joint work with X" (e.g. in a footnote).

However, to really get credit for this joint research, you should prepare a manuscript and try to get it published, or at least release a preprint you can put online (if there isn't time to get it published before you apply to grad school).

For the editing assistance, the most you can get is a thanks in the acknowledgements, and help with editing is not likely to impress an admissions committee.

Answer 2

My answer is somewhat of an amalgam of previous answers, with a little softening.

As to the editing, there is no problem. It is fine (and encouraged) for PhD students to ask others to proofread or edit their writing. Out of courtesy, she should acknowledge your assistance in an appropriate part of the thesis (usually a special page near the beginning). But you should be doing this either as a personal favor to her, or in exchange for money; other than that, there is nothing in it for you. It isn't something that would likely interest an admissions committee (though you could certainly list that you did it, as it does give you a little extra exposure to professional writing).

As to the substantive research and writing contributions, there are possible ethical issues. You should talk to the PhD student and make sure that she has told her advisor and her committee about your contributions, and that they are okay with it. You should also ask about any special procedures that the university might have for including collaborative work. (For instance, at my PhD institution, they would need a signed letter from you confirming which parts were yours.) If you get any sense that she might not be following all the rules, or that she may be intending to pass off the work as her own, you should go to her advisor and explain everything. (Ideally, you have already been talking to her advisor, since he or she presumably is the ultimate supervisor of your research work.) The fact that some of the text was actually written by you will invite the most scrutiny, so be sure this is clear to everyone.

She should certainly describe your contributions, very specifically, in the acknowledgements. If the thesis work is going to be published in a paper, depending on the level of your contributions, you might be entitled to coauthorship on that paper. You should discuss these authorship issues with the student now (e.g. who will be first author, etc), but you might also want to talk with some other faculty member, since it sounds like you may not have enough experience to know what is reasonable or customary in your field.

In the short term, the way you would get "credit" for your work, for the purposes of graduate admissions, is to get a letter of recommendation from the student, as well as from her advisor or whichever other faculty member is supervising your research. They can tell the admission committee in detail about what you did, and how they think it reflects on your research potential; that's likely to be even more helpful than being able to point to a part of a paper or thesis as yours.

Answer 3

For my MSc Thesis, I put the people who proof read and helped edit my thesis in the acknowledgements.

I think the admissions committee would care if you did some of the research, and if the PhD student was your primary advisor for that research, it would be good to get some form of letter of recommendation from him/her. A few people I know submitted 4 letters instead of 3, because a lot of the research they did was a PhD student and they thought a 4 letter from that student would help them.

If you didn't do any research, you basically edited and made suggestions, I'm not really sure an adcomm would be interested. Great, your a friendly dude who helped his friend, now show me what you've done yourself.

But I'm not really sure how the adcomm will look at "editing" someone else's PhD thesis.

If you did some of the writing for the PhD thesis, I think thats weird; all of the writing should be done by the PhD student.

Answer 4

You write that you are "helping a PhD student to write a portion of her PhD thesis".

Clearly from your question and comments this isn't a stapler thesis: this isn't a case where you and the PhD candidate have co-authored papers, where your work would be in the thesis and explicitly attributed to you.

In your other comments, you make it clear that you have written passages that are in her thesis. That goes way beyond just doing collaborative research. If it's in the student's PhD thesis as her own writing and her own research, then she is falsely representing that she's done the research, and she's falsely representing that the thesis is all her own writing.

In any university that I knew of up til now, that would result in the thesis being failed.**

I think you need to find out the rules of your university pretty quickly, because although the PhD candidate will get the worst of the enforcement, you could get hurt by this. This is now your responsibility to put right, for your own sake. That's because if it is against the rules, then you have unwittingly been complicit with the PhD student in what, upon submission of the thesis, would be the breaking of those rules. I think ignorance of the rules is unlikely to be taken as innocence in any ensuing disciplinary proceedings. At best you could make a case of being led astray by trusted colleagues, but that's going to damage your relationship with them. It is possible, as things stand, to extricate yourself from this situation without too much damage.

So don't go to the candidate or her supervisors to ask for their interpretation of the rules yet (if at all). Find and read the relevant rule yourself. They are almost certainly on your university intranet, if not the outward-facing website; failing that, ask in the university library.

Here, for example, is the rule for PhDs at University College London (UCL):

The work in the thesis submitted by a student must be their own work and the submission of a thesis for examination will be regarded as a declaration of that fact.

The thesis may include collaborative work, but this should be stated as such, and must be written up by the PhD candidate, not the collaborator(s).

If, as I suspect, co-authorship of a PhD thesis at your university is not allowed, then you need to insist to the PhD student and her supervisors that the passages you've written be removed from the thesis. Do it gently, politely, in a collegiate spirit, but do it unambiguously. As you've done genuinely new research, you'll be submitting the words you've written to a journal, so tell them that - that should be enough for them to be sure to remove it from the thesis. Keep the paper trail of all of this (including the emails or other records of when you've sent your material to the PhD candidate in the past), to protect yourself.

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_{** though through the comments below, I've learnt that the University of California in San Diego does allow some co-authoring, providing advance permission from the Dean of Graduate Studies has been obtained.}

Answer 5

I am helping a PhD student to write a portion of her PhD thesis.

Based on this statement, I assume that the thesis is a monograph. I think it is very weird for an undergrad to write parts of a PhD thesis. Although the work in a thesis can clearly be the result of collaborative work (in the form of co-authored papers or other publications), a thesis in essence must be an individual effort.

... and with a bit of editing here and there

The PhD student should describe in the acknowledgement section that you proof-read and/or edited parts of the thesis.

Also, when I apply to graduate school afterwards, how would I show the admission committee that I have done this work?

If there is a scientific or research value to your contribution, some or all of it could end up in a publication, of which you can ask to be a co-author.

I don't think a PhD thesis can be co-authored.

No, and again, I find it very strange that you are actively writing sections in the thesis. Furthermore, most academic institutions will ask PhD students to sign a document stating "I am the sole author of this thesis" when submitting their thesis.