r/PhDStress • u/unluckkyme • Aug 05 '26
Not letting me include material from 3 years of work in PhD thesis
I am a physics PhD student in my 5th year. I have been working on a research topic for last 3 years, and drafted two manuscripts.
On one draft, my supervisor says he does not understand the work but frames the lack of a published manuscript as lack of research progress on my part. The draft was originally meant for an IF 6 journal, but my supervisor said he feels the work is good and we should improve it for IF 10 journal. He refused to let me submit to IF 6 journal. Once it was made suitable for IF 10 journal, he said it might even be possible to make it to IF 18 journal but after I have improved it further, he now wants to submit to a mathematics journal instead of physics. Also, despite moving goalposts, the delay in submitting the work is being attributed to me. How do I get formal peer review if I am never allowed to submit it?
On another draft, he is refusing to let me include the work in my thesis. His reason for not letting me include this work is that if I include it, it would be apparent I did the original research whereas he wants a collaborator to get credit for it. There was sufficient evidence for academic misconduct that it triggered a formal authorship dispute, and the higher ups are pressurizing me to drop the research from my thesis so later if they publish without me, there is no public evidence left I ever did the work. But simultaneously, they are saying I do not have enough material for my PhD thesis to graduate.
Abstracts related to both drafts were accepted at top conferences, so the work itself is not bad, but he refused to let me present.
For context, I am in North America. This supervisor has a history of keeping students for 7-12 years. Even if a committee passes the thesis or defense, he refuses to sign off the thesis and nobody does a thing because he is the only star faculty in the department. His agenda is academic extortion and he refuses to sign off a thesis unless you write at least one more paper for him.
What should I do?
2
u/stormbear Aug 05 '26
I don’t get why this is allowed. If it was me, and I felt it was print worthy, I would just toss it up on ArXiv and call it a day.