I am now writing the literature review of my doctoral thesis and doing an assessment of methodology used in previous studies on the field. I am unsure if I should include and discuss previous MA theses that I've found. While some of the MA theses are relevant to my research, they haven't been peer reviewed and the research methods haven't been validated. Please advise.
-
3The same could be said for your thesis-to-be. Do you want people to ignore it?– Jon CusterCommented Aug 9 at 16:00
-
2@JonCuster, some people don't distinguish between thesis and dissertation. The OP is referring to their doctoral work per the title question.– BuffyCommented Aug 9 at 16:16
-
3It would be unusual in my field for an MA thesis to use an unvalidated method.– Azor Ahai -him-Commented Aug 9 at 16:55
Add a comment
|
4 Answers
Be careful not to put too much weight on peer review. Peer review is a tool, but it does not deem results "correct". Flawed results get through peer review. Good results may not.
As a sophisticated reader of work published in your specific field of interest, you have both the power and responsibility to think critically about the work you read and make your own determinations about its suitability. Peer review may be a helpful filter and organize you around a starting point, but you should not take a paper as unimpeachable truth merely because it's been through peer review.
It's certainly reasonable to expect that research methods are validated for them to be useful, but do not mistake peer review for validation of research methods.
answered Aug 9 at 16:24
I would include them, but have them labelled for what they are. They have, after all, gone through something of a peer review if they have been vetted (read, reviewed, ...) by one or more professors and accepted for the degree.
Omitting them might be problematic, depending on what they contain. Just make it understood that the work hasn't gone through a publishing process.
This 100% comes down to how you're using the Master's Theses in your review.
- If you found some idea solely in a thesis and discuss it in your review, then it's plagiaristic to not cite the review.
- If you don't describe anything having to do with the thesis in your review, then you have no reason to cite it, and shouldn't.
- If the Thesis describes a non-original idea, and you just used the thesis to track down the legitimate sources for those ideas, and you read and cite those, you don't generally need to cite the thesis, but there are situations where you might choose to cite it anyway (like maybe you found it particularly motivating, or if the thesis posed the discussion in the context of a field close to your own, and the original sources don't).
answered Aug 9 at 18:17
I find that a thesis is often the clearest explanation of a person's work. Subsequent peer-reviewed papers and articles are almost always less detailed. There is no problem whatsoever in citing a thesis. The same argument can be made for technical reports, which haven't gone through peer review (perhaps editing my a supervisor/manager), but can contain very useful contributions. There are several examples of this in the world of UAVs, where reports done for NASA were later made public and are cited, but aren't peer-reviewed. If an author has published articles from their thesis, then I will cite the one that I used the most. In short, don't worry about it.
