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[whimsical]

A friend of mine just quit hu's doctoral program, just before hu's defense. The reason:

Friend had made a significant and very important discovery in hu's field and made that the centrepiece of hu's dissertation and research program. One week before hu's defense, hu was reading a journal in the language of the country where the material which the dissertation research was focused on (dissertation was in english, though) and there on the page was the same very important discovery (it had the nature of discovering something in the history of the discipline in that country). Friend couldn't see how hu could defend hu's dissertation honestly as a very significant discovery, since someone else had made that discovery at the same time as hu, but had published it before hu.

Starting all over was not an option for friend as hu had taken eight years to do the research. Cancelling the defense, of course, was an option. But then what?

What would you do if you were me and heard this story? if you were the friend?

[larryc]

Maybe you friend quit because he or she was named "hu." I mean, how embarrassing. It is not even a word.

I think there is more going on here than your friend has told you. If the friend really had finished writing and was ready to defend, a frank conversation with the committee chair would probably have smoothed things over. It happens all the time that a dissertation gets preempted by a brand new publication. It is terrible luck, but it hardly invalidates the years of research.

[scampster]

I don't think every dissertation needs to make a "very important discovery" if the alternative is dropping out after all that work. Was there nothing salvageable at all?

I had the thunder stolen away from my central dissertation chapter as I was finishing up the manuscript, but there was still enough different and unique about my work that, honestly, the scooping made my chapter even better since I had to take the analysis deeper since I was no longer the first to get these type of measurements. Also, with the trend towards the "take 3-5 papers and slap an intro and conclusion on it" style dissertation in the sciences, even if one chapter got scooped, I still had two other results chapters to defend.

[galactic_hedgehog]

That someone else published this discovery in no way diminishes that fact that your friend discovered it independently.

[larryc]

That someone else published this discovery in no way diminishes that fact that your friend discovered it independently.

Exactly. Alfred Russel Wallace was no Charles Darwin, but he is still an important figure.

[onion]

I'm surprised that the advisor and committee permitted the student to just cancel and quit at this point.  If I were the advisor, I would be pissed that one of my students was just going to give up after 8 years of work--part of which included my labor and investment in the student and the project.  If this were my student and this other research discovery was really that important, we'd have a long sit down and strategize as to how student could re-frame their own project, as necessary, and get defended and get on with it.

I agree with LarryC that there might be something more going on than your friend has told you.

[hegemony]

I knew someone in this situation.  He had discovered a text in an archive, and the edition of the text was a substantial part of the dissertation; the rest was tracing the background, etc.  He arrived at the defense to find that one of the examiners had discovered that someone else had very recently published the same text.  The rest of the dissertation had also been pre-empted, as the person who published the edition had done the same detective work that formed the rest of the dissertation.

This was at a British university, where the examiners come from outside and have not been part of the process beforehand.  The person failed the defense and hence the Ph.D.  Of course it was a debacle.  He picked himself up, went off to another university and did another Ph.D.  This one passed.

[southerntransplant]

Whatever reputation I have in this field rests primarily on a couple of papers I wrote in the mid-90's. Someone else was working along similar lines and was ready to defend when my paper came out. His advisor told him to go ahead and defend but he decided to take a year and find a different approach. He did, but he didn't have to.

Ironically, the fellow I unwittingly scooped is one of my better friends in this field.

Bottom line is, though, that independent discovery does not invalidate a dissertation.

[oldadjunct]

A "very important discovery" (though nice) is not a benchmark for a dissertation, most especially in the humanities.  I thought the goal was a "significant contribution to scholarship."  We could make a major step towards solving the glut on the market though if that were the new benchmark.  And just think of all the really cool dissertations:

Iocast Knew: An Examination of Sophocles' Early Life
Shakespeare and Psychedelics: The Evidence Hamlet was Tripping
(Re)valuing Hawthorn's Promiscuity: Back(grow)ing the "Scarlet Letter"
What Maise Really Knew: James's Financial Records
Papa: The Hemingway/Presley Letters

[hegemony]

If independent discovery doesn't validate a dissertation, why should we insist that students become familiar with the literature in their field?  Wouldn't it be simpler to keep knowledge of their field from them, so they can reinvent the wheel and get their degree?  Seriously, do the sciences operate like this?  "I have discovered the molecular composition of water, but I discovered it independently, I didn't read about it, so I deserve my PhD now"?

I'm thinking that at the top universities, the dissertation really has to be a significant original contribution to knowledge. That's my experience of the top universities.  Maybe not so at lesser universities.  At my current university, the topics are certainly original -- it's whether they're a contribution to knowledge that's the question.

[watermarkup]

I've published articles reporting very important discoveries in my humanities field. They tend to be something like 10 pages or less, because there are only so many ways to way, "Look what I found!" And your friend found the discovery reported in a single page, correct?

So at worst, your friend has to drop a few duplicated pages and tone down the breathless excitement of reporting a discovery. Probably he or she could just add a sentence to the effect that the discovery is alluded to by Milosz Czernowicz or whoever, but that the present dissertation puts the discovery in its historical and cultural context over 380 glorious pages, or whatever.

[advil]

If independent discovery doesn't validate a dissertation, why should we insist that students become familiar with the literature in their field?  Wouldn't it be simpler to keep knowledge of their field from them, so they can reinvent the wheel and get their degree?  Seriously, do the sciences operate like this?  "I have discovered the molecular composition of water, but I discovered it independently, I didn't read about it, so I deserve my PhD now"

"Independently" means that it was discovered, published or publicized by two independent people/groups working in parallel around roughly the same time, not that someone started from scratch ignoring previous literature.  Seriously, this has happened all the time both historically and in the present -- I would go so far as to guess that most major discoveries were discovered independently by multiple people.  But of course it doesn't mean you shouldn't know the literature...

[oldadjunct]

I've published articles reporting very important discoveries in my humanities field. They tend to be something like 10 pages or less, because there are only so many ways to way, "Look what I found!" And your friend found the discovery reported in a single page, correct?

So at worst, your friend has to drop a few duplicated pages and tone down the breathless excitement of reporting a discovery. Probably he or she could just add a sentence to the effect that the discovery is alluded to by Milosz Czernowicz or whoever, but that the present dissertation puts the discovery in its historical and cultural context over 380 glorious pages, or whatever.

I have not been in this side of academia since completing my diss, though it was done to rigorous standards under leading figures and still garners an occasional citation sometimes to question and other times to scaffold on points I made.

Precisely, watermarkup, things like your discoveries are worth short items in "Notes and Queries", though they seldom are the stuff of dissertations.  For example, one of my chapters was about a certain text by a certain Puritan divine.  At MLA only weeks before my defense, a new discovery came to light that the authorship was (far) less than certain and was likely only a transcription.  The ensuing quick and frantic huddle with my committee determined that the larger point of the chapter had nothing to do with the authorship; a paragraph in the chapter, an explanatory footnote "in light of recent scholarship....", and some minor revisions in the Conclusion solved the problem.

Alternately, in an entirely different part of my research for an unrelated seminar I discovered an edition of Leaves of Grass that simply did not fit into the regularly received sequence of editions (I forget the details - wrong fronts piece, a minor poem out of sequence, another minor poem missing? I can imagine some poor ABD's head now exploding)  This was a discovery, since what I was holding just didn't fit the acknowldeged genealogy of Leaves of Grass.  But it simply didn't matter, except perhaps as it's own minor footnote, that in library X a discrepancy Y exists.  After multiple checks, some discussion, and outreach to various active Whitman scholars (Justin Kaplan had just published his fine biography), every one shrugged.

I think that the following quote does a nice job of representing well the nature of a dissertation and dodges (kicking the can down the road?) the issues of "discovery", "independent", "very", "contribution", etc.:
The dissertation is a scholarly work, suggesting that the author is the “world’s leading authority” on the subject of the dissertation.   Emphasis added.
http://cnx.org/content/m14736/latest/

[dellaroux]

So, did Leibnitz or Newton have to drop out of the scene over their parallel invention/discovery of the calculus?

[hyperbole]

I have romantic visions of some of you out in the world actually discovering things. I'm in English and, like most, I don't do literary history--at least not the sort some of the earlier posts parody as versions of this type of scooping in our field. Most readable books like that are written by historians or journalists. My dissertation exemplified myself discovering my own strange way of reading texts and discovering ways of making that oddity interesting to others working in my field. Nothing anyone could scoop, I'm afraid, except with one of those doggie walker accoutrements.