Publication Requirement - for PhD Applied Chemistry

PUBLICATION REQUIREMENT (PhD students only)

The objective of graduate research is to produce and disseminate new knowledge. Furthermore, publication is important for students' education and their ability to find suitable employment.  The quality and quantity of peer-reviewed published work is a generally accepted measure of output.  A minimum of three first-author, peer-reviewed publications is the expectation of all PhD students in the Department of Chemistry. Thus, to have their Thesis Defense Request Form approved, students need to have two publications accepted and a third submitted in well-regarded, peer-reviewed journals.  The student should be first author on all three of these publications, and they must all arise out of the student’s dissertation research.  Fulfilling this minimum publication requirement does not in itself guarantee that the student will be awarded a PhD. 

The Thesis Defense Request Form must be submitted to the department head at least one week prior to the defense.  Thesis defenses should be informally scheduled with the student’s committee at least several months in advance, at which time it should be foreseeable that the publication requirement will be fulfilled by the time the Thesis Defense Request Form is due.

Exceptions

There may be cases where a student has completed an extensive amount of high quality work, but the focus of the work results in less than three publications or the team effort of the project results in authorship lower than first-authorship.  In such cases, the student may petition the entire Department’s faculty for approval to schedule a thesis defense.  The student must alert the department head or assistant department head several weeks in advance of the thesis defense date that he or she intends to petition, so that the petition can be considered during a regular meeting of the faculty.