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On the Internet, I have found that some people have graduated with a PhD by means of a “sandwich thesis”. Could anyone explain what it is?

Wrzlprmft
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Dr. Snoopy
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    This might be termed "PhD by Published Work" in some UK universities. That is were a body of previously published work is assessed instead of a single new thesis. – TafT Jun 28 '17 at 07:26
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    The Finnish way of saying this is "artikkeliväitöskirja", or "article thesis". – Tommi Dec 30 '17 at 17:20
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    My understanding (as a brit) is that "Phd by Published work" and "sandwich thesis" are seperate things. "PhD by Published work" is a mechanism for people who published PhD standard work but did not participate in a regular PhD program to register with a university and convert their pre-existing published work into a PhD. "Sandwich thesis" is a thesis format. AIUI lots of people use the "Sandwich thesis" format, while being regular PhD students. – Peter Green Feb 10 '20 at 16:49

3 Answers3

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I believe that a sandwich thesis (sometimes called an integrated thesis / stapler thesis) consists of a collection of published or in-press articles (some schools also allow submitted articles). These articles are included in the thesis verbatim. The publications are usually preceded by an elaborate introduction that sets the context for the thesis.

EDIT:

As Willie Wong pointed out, there is also usually a final discussion / conclusion after the integrated papers.

GWW
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    This is essentially correct. It's sometimes called a "stapler" thesis as well, for obvious reasons. – aeismail Feb 16 '12 at 06:08
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    the collection of published / in-press articles usually makes up the bologne and lettuce, while one is often asked to tack on two slices of bread (introduction/conclusion) on the outside. – Willie Wong Feb 16 '12 at 09:38
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    @GWW: that's just what I've heard used (so don't take it as authoritative in anyway). And "open-faced sandwiches" are not unheard of. And perhaps there is an academic equivalent of the KFC Double Down :-). – Willie Wong Feb 16 '12 at 14:39
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    In some fields these are also called "Portfolio dissertations" or "3-article dissertations". – Kieran Mar 09 '12 at 15:51
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    This is the standard in Scandinavia, at least in the natural sciences. – gerrit Jun 07 '12 at 21:52
  • Are they also called "thesis by publication"? – Andrew Grimm Apr 08 '13 at 03:14
  • @AndrewGrimm: I'm not sure I've heard that name before but it seems fitting. – GWW Apr 08 '13 at 14:01
  • My own thesis consisted of exactly one paper that I had already submitted elsewhere. All I did to it to turn it into a thesis was adjust the margins and add a page of acknowledgements. This is fairly common in mathematics. – Andy Putman Feb 08 '14 at 03:38
  • @AndyPutman: That's awesome I'm really jealous, we still have to write an expanded introduction for each paper. – GWW Feb 08 '14 at 04:56
  • @GWW : Is that a requirement of your advisor or of your university? The standard for a thesis at all the universities I've been affiliated with (only three and all private universities in the US, so far from a representative sample) is that it is a document that the advisor is willing to to sign off on. Old-fashioned kinds of advisors might require more, but my advisor's philosophy (which I share and use as my policy with my own PhD students) is that it's a waste of time to spend time writing something you can't publish. Better to move on to the next project. – Andy Putman Feb 08 '14 at 05:13
  • @AndyPutman: Our department has bizarre and archaic thesis requirements. We are required to have an introduction, two data and a concluding chapter. The data chapters cannot be unaltered manuscripts, they have to be modified and any supplementary information has to be merged with the results. – GWW Feb 08 '14 at 16:41
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Supplementing GWW's excellent answer somewhat, the "sandwich thesis" or similar concepts, seem to be rising in popularity. For example, in my University, they're afforded equal standing to the more traditional "book"-style thesis, and in my Department, they're the required form of a dissertation.

The reasoning for this is fairly straightforward. In many fields that don't rely on book publishing as the primary means of publication (most of the sciences), the production of a large manuscript-style work is likely a one time event. One can have an extremely successful career without publishing another book, and the mechanisms to publish books on research findings (rather than say methods) may not actually exist.

As such, requiring doctoral students to produce something like that is counter-productive - they gain no experience in the future requirement to publish journal articles, and leave graduate school with a body of work that isn't represented in the journal literature. The idea of the sandwich thesis is to get around this by layering several journal-style publications (either submitted or unsubmitted) as the meat of the sandwich, with an introduction, perhaps a joint high-level methods section and a conclusion section weaving them into a coherent narrative as the bread. This allows the student's work to flow nicely into the literature in a way that's useful to all involved.

Fomite
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    Also: almost nobody reads a thesis buried in a library archive in an archaic format. Putting the "meat" into the peer-reviewed literature makes it much easier to find. – user244795 Nov 29 '12 at 20:01
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What is described here as a sandwich thesis (a collection of published (or intending to be published) articles + Introduction + Discussion) is also called a compilation thesis. In the Netherlands this is a very common format for nearly all science PhD theses. I'm not sure what Peter Green meant by "AIUI lots of people use the "Sandwich thesis" format, while being regular PhD students". Nowadays, most Dutch universities also publish their PhD theses in online public archives.

JL Senior
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