The Philosophers' Cocoon

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader writes:

I would like to hear people's thoughts on how much credit a dissertation deserves.

Here is what I mean. On the one hand, almost all dissertations contain some original theories, arguments, ideas, etc. While dissertations are not academic publications (in the US), they are "publicized" and publicly accessible (on ProQuest, for example).

On the other hand, since dissertations are not regarded as publications, people usually do not give credit to them. People do not read them unless someone is interested in a topic and happens to know that a person wrote a dissertation about it. And I suspect that few journal reviewers would say that the main argument in a paper is not original because someone has developed a similar theory in their dissertation. Even if you are the first person to develop a theory in your dissertation and your dissertation is publicly defended and officially online, the credit almost entirely goes to the person who publishes it; in some cases, this person would not be you.

It makes me feel that dissertations should deserve more credit. Publishing a dissertation, or chapters of a dissertation, is not making some thoughts and arguments officially public from one's mind; rather, it is a process of changing where it is publicly–from ProQuest to somewhere else.

I know that in some countries dissertations must be published as books when they are finished, I personally believe that is the right way to go. What do you all think?

Another reader submitted the following response: 

I think you are overthinking the notion of credit. There is no central body – not even the APA – who tells people what credit things deserve. Credit, in one sense, is a function of the value others put on something. This is how credit is understood in science, at least by scholars in science studies, broadly construed, including Robert Merton and David Hull, for example. So you do not deserve anything for a PhD but the PhD itself. If there is more of value in it, then send it out to journals. I published 4 articles from my PhD. I got out of it all there was in it. Similarly with citations. If no one is citing your articles it may be because no one finds them of value. I have articles that are often cited (100+ times), and ones that largely neglected. I can like some of the latter more than I like some of the former, what people have valued in my scholarship is what they have cited.

This is an interesting response, in part because I have a different reaction. So I am hoping we can have a good and interesting question on citation and credit-giving practices, and I am curious to hear what everyone else thinks!

Now, of course, there is no central body that tells (or should tell) people what credit things deserve. Further, publishing work from one’s dissertation in journals is a good idea and likely to get your work more noticed and engaged with. That being said, I think dissertations should be cited when relevant, and I don't think the only (or primary) function of citations is to confer value upon a given work. Rather, citations function (or should function) at least in part to provide an accurate picture of intellectual history. Let me explain.

Recently, I came across a social media thread in which someone asked whether it was unprofessional for a journal reviewer to suggest that they cite a dissertation. Interestingly, virtually everyone in the thread seemed to agree: strictly-speaking, dissertations are considered 'published', so what the referee did was fine. If a dissertation is relevant, then by all means one should cite it–as it is a published work in the public domain. Again, I agree. I routinely cite dissertations in my work, and have even on occasion cited MA theses–not primarily because I think they are 'valuable' or whatever, but simply because they exist and defend in print scholarly ideas relevant to my work.

As someone who thinks we have a general duty to be fair to people, it seems to me unfair both to other authors and to one's readers to obscure intellectual history by failing to cite relevant work, regardless of where that work appears–whether it be in a journal article, an archived preprint, a dissertation, or even a blog post. If someone published an idea relevant to your work–for example, an idea similar to your own before you did–then failing to cite it does a double disservice: it unfairly deprives someone of credit for their intellectual ideas, and unfairly deprives readers of a clear and accurate picture of the history of ideas. This is particularly important, I think, given the ways that social and disciplinary hierarchies can erroneously confer primary credit for ideas upon well-situated authors. For some examples, see this series (including especially this story by Jessica Wilson in particular) on better citation practices that I briefly began many years ago.

In brief, I disagree with the conception of citations as a 'value-recognizing' enterprise. I don't think that is (or should be) the primary purpose of citing work. Whether something is actually valuable should be determined through scholarly debate. After all, I'm sure that most of us know some really bad articles that are cited all over the place. We cite those papers not because they are particularly 'valuable', but instead because they exist and make particular arguments that would be wrong to ignore, pretending they don't exist. The purpose of citations, I want to say, is a matter not of conferring value but of scholarship, providing an accurate and up-to-date picture of the history of ideas as they relate to your particular contribution.

Now, of course, maybe I am wrong about this–and I imagine some readers will disagree. But these, at any rate, are the reasons why I agree with the OP: I think dissertations should be cited when relevant, so as to be fair to their author (as a fellow scholar) and to one's readers (viz. scholarly accuracy). But this is just my point-of-view. What's yours, and why?