One reason that we’re writing this newsletter is to convince students (and their advisers) that a good thesis should be original, but not necessarily “novel.” Rarely will a project involve a new theory and a new method and a new dataset and a dessert topping. Everything you do will draw on work others have done—and that’s not only okay, that’s great! The whole point is for you to contribute an idea to a conversation, not a monologue. When you’re embarking on a thesis, you should be clear with yourself about what you can reasonably expect to be original — that is, whatever addition you are making — and where you will be employing methods and approaches that builds on others’ work.
Science, you see, is incremental. Popular “histories” of science often treat major breakthroughs as the products of lone geniuses working in isolation, their big-brained IQs bludgeoning difficult problems into submission. This, however, is very rarely the case. It’s so rare, in fact, that it is almost guaranteed that you will not be the next Einstein or Newton. In fact, if you think for a second, it can’t both be the case that science is the product of lone geniuses bending knowledge to their will and also that—as everyone knows—scientists are always trying to race to publish their results first. That competition implies that scientific discoveries are always within reach of many researchers, meaning that scientific advances build on insights, techniques, and improvements that are commonly available to specialists. To take one familiar example of how scientific insights can be arrived at almost simultaneously: even if Charles Darwin had never published his account of evolution, Alfred Russel Wallace would have published his at almost exactly the same time.
This should put your thesis research into perspective. One of the many goals of a thesis is to acquaint you with how your field (or subfield, or sub-subfield) approaches a given task. By the end of your project, you should be better equipped to answer questions like:
What are the standards of evidence by which we should judge your project?
How does your project tell us something novel about the world?
What arguments in the field does your project’s findings support, and which does it tend to weaken?
What methodologies are researchers in your field currently using, and which have they abandoned?
What researchers (by name!) would be most interested in your findings, and why?
Note that all of these relate to your project, but none of them require original research. Instead, they all require that you become familiar with how other people think, judge, and act. The thesis should be centered around an original contribution (your spin, addition, or criticism of existing work), but it should be solidly grounded upon what others have done before.
And this is good! Whether you go on to academia or (more lucratively) some other enterprise, one of the questions you’ll be asked is: what do you know how to do? Mastery of techniques is important because it enables you to accomplish tasks—if you can run a regression, set up an experiment, work with a focus group, or analyze a text corpus, well, you can do that for anyone, from an employer to a principal investigator. Similarly, knowing the literature can help you evaluate potential approaches to a new problem and suggest ways to solve it—and solutions to avoid. A thesis that “only” lets you accomplish these goals would be a successful one. In fact, if you are trying to do everything by yourself from first principles, you’re probably going to waste a lot of effort and come up with a worse outcome.
Thinking about how your thesis can help you learn how to use and apply other skills highlights how a thesis is meant to cap off your undergrad studying, which is largely derivative of other people, and to bridge your career to its next step, which will involve more high-level problem-solving (or even problem-defining) skills. The trick, of course, is that you can really only learn to apply methods and skills correctly if you are doing so in the context of meaningful work—and being meaningful at this stage of your education means that you are doing something that nobody else is quite doing, because if they were doing it you could just apply their solution.
A thesis, then, should demonstrate that you’ve gone some way in mastering skills and a body of literature, and then show that you can conceive and execute an independent project that would make a contribution to that literature. Being clear about what you will do that’s original and what you will do that will involve learning what others have done will help you make that contribution and explain it.
The takeaway: Be clear in working with your adviser—and be clear in talking to yourself—about what you will be contributing that will be “original” and what existing tools (or data, interpretations, approaches—whatever!) will be based upon what others have done.
The practical: You should both be aware that there’s lots of material available (either on the Internet or through scholarly resources) about theory, methods, background—just about anything you want to know. Use this. It’s not plagiarism to follow a recipe! (You should cite everything, of course.) You should also work with your adviser to find these resources and to better define your problem (both in general and in the sense of something you’re stuck on immediately). And knowing what others have done will help you validate your claim that something is an original contribution.