Publishing Time-Frame Evaluation for Doctoral Students in United Kingdom

Abstract

The first objective of the study was to compute the time to completion and publication of original scientific publications for medical doctoral students in the UK. A second objective was to evaluate if PhD theses format (monograph or publication-based) can influence the time to completion and publication of original scientific publications. We assessed a small sample of free full text medical doctoral theses from universities in the United Kingdom (mostly from the University of Manchester), which have produced at least 2 original scientific publications by the end of the doctoral studies. The time elapsed between 2 consecutive publications from the same thesis was considered an approximation of the time to completion and publication of the second publication. In the case of prospective theses, the median time to completion and publication of original scientific publications from medical doctoral theses was 10.17 months. We found that there was a statistically significant difference between the time (to completion and publication) medians of the publications from traditional theses format and of the publications from publication-based theses format. Time to completion and publication of original scientific publications for medical doctoral students needs to be further evaluated on a larger scale, based on more theses from several medical faculties in the UK.