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Writing a PhD thesis is a personal and professional milestone for many researchers. But the process needs to change with the times.
According to one of those often-quoted statistics that should be true but probably isn't, the average number of people who read a PhD thesis all the way through is 1.6. And that includes the author. More interesting might be the average number of PhD theses that the typical scientist - and reader of Nature - has read from start to finish. Would it reach even that (probably apocryphal) benchmark? What we know for sure is that the reading material keeps on coming, with tens of thousands of new theses typed up each year.
To what end? Reading back over a thesis can be like opening up a teenage diary: a painful reminder of a younger, more naive self. The prose is often rough and rambling, the analyses spotted with errors, the methods soundly eclipsed by modern ones. And students in the process of writing a thesis can find themselves in a very dark place indeed: lost in information, overwhelmed by literature, stuck for the next sentence, seduced by procrastination and wondering why on earth they signed up to this torture...