Thesis peer review "service"

Question

There are a lot of post about peer review of papers, but how about graduate/undergraduate thesis? Is there somewhere on the vast internet, where one can submit his thesis for a peer review.

The reason I am asking this is because I am finishing my master's in engineering and so far my advisor has not seen my thesis even once. The only "review" I got was a friend who found out only grammatical and punctuation errors and I did the same for her. But the fact that we know nothing about each other's research stops us from performing a quality peer review.

Answer 1

There is a full-blown, high-quality peer-review process for a thesis: it's called the thesis committee.

If you mean a service where you can get help improve your document before you submit it to your committee, that is something that one's advisor(s) tasks. Maybe you can actually get help from friends, colleagues, or in the most severe cases your advisor's friends, but there is not much.

The thing that may be closely related is that, in some systems (the French one at least), there is a person that is responsible for validating the PhD student's manuscript before it gets sent to the committee. Then, it's that person's responsibility (in theory) to do a basic check of your manuscript and your work, and decide if there is enough to gather a committee. I say “in theory”, because this person will probably get dozens of theses per year (at the very least) and can only perform the most basic checks. In practice, they most often do not check the manuscript content, but its form (does it follow the University's standards), as well as some simple indicators of your research (has the candidate published? how many times? did he attend conferences? that sort of stuff).

Answer 2

Your situation suggests that your relationship with your adviser has broken down. Fix it. I usually find going out for coffee and just talking, not necessarily about your thesis, always helps.

You can always get editorial assistance but you want expert assistance. This is where your adviser comes in. Make it easy for him or her. Submit perhaps a chapter at a time. Then meet and have a good honest discussion.

Other than the above, search for a newly minted PhD candidate in your department, perhaps a former student of your adviser, and ask him or her to review your work. Believe me, this does wonders because of the motivation that the newly minted PhD candidate brings to the review. By newly minted PhD, I mean a person who has already completed his study.