Medical theses and derivative articles: dissemination of contents and publication patterns

Abstract

Doctoral theses are an important source of publication in universities, although little research has been carried out on the publications resulting from theses, on so-called derivative articles. This study investigates how derivative articles can be identified through a text analysis based on the full-text of a set of medical theses and the full-text of articles, with which they shared authorship. The text similarity analysis methodology applied consisted in exploiting the full-text articles according to organization of scientific discourse IMRaD (Introduction, Methodology, Results and Discussion) using the TurnItIn plagiarism tool. The study found that the text similarity rate in the Discussion section can be used to discriminate derivative articles from non-derivative articles. Additional findings were: the first position of the thesis's author dominated in 85 % of derivative articles, the participation of supervisors as coauthors occurred in 100 % of derivative articles, the authorship credit retained by the thesis's author was 42 % in derivative articles, the number of coauthors by article was 5 in derivative articles versus 6.4 coauthors, as average, in nonderivative articles and the time differential regarding the year of thesis completion showed that 87.5 % of derivative articles were published before or in the same year of thesis completion.

Knowledge Production in Two Types of Medical PhD Routes—What’s to Gain?

“…A study on UK medical PhDs completed in 2007-2011 found a 72,433 mean for words [7], a value larger than the ones we found: 58,969 for publication-based theses and 67,897 for traditional theses (see Table 2). …”

“…Even more, arranging a manuscript to fit a journal's requirements can lead to rephrasing of the study's initial text. There are some that think textual analysis is a good method to detect thesis-related articles [7], but in our opinion it cannot always correctly detect all medical thesis-related articles. Thus, two independent researchers, with the same expertise and experience in medical research methods, browsed each thesis from our study and established, with full consensus, the number of studies elaborated and included in the thesis representing original research pieces the PhD student conducted.…”

“…So far, the research on doctoral theses has been scarce because of theses' extended text, limited access to full-text theses from university libraries, and the perceived low quality or poor design of many dissertations [7]. Some of these factors may have diminished due to online repositories and emerging doctoral routes.…”

“…Regarding some of the factors influencing doctoral knowledge publication, we considered not only PhD supervisors [7], but also on the co-supervisors and advisors provided by the Manchester eScholar Services, and grouping them resulted in the number of thesis' contributors, which we used to evaluate the scientific help that a PhD candidate received during candidature.…”

“…Previous studies showed that most new knowledge has been produced by young scientists and recruits [6] and that most major scientific discoveries were the contribution of young people [2]. Doctoral research is considered an important source of scientific publications for universities [7]. This study is placed in the context of general academic pressure to publish and of emerging new graduate or doctoral programs, which have expanded beyond the traditional PhD in many countries.…”