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Last year, I competed my PhD, which was submitted as a PhD-by-papers. This was a collection of six papers, which varied in status from published to not-yet-submitted. In this blog post, I share my thoughts about the experience of completing a PhD in this way, and offer tentative pieces of advice for those navigating it.

What is a PhD-by-papers?

First, let’s talk about the format. Rather than submitting a traditional thesis, the idea with a PhD-by-papers is that you turn in a set of papers. While these will stand alone as regards their arguments and content, there should nevertheless be an overarching theme to them, or an account of some phenomenon that they all defend in their own way. In my case, a couple of the papers refined my account of confabulation and its potential, and the others applied this account to different contexts, such as confabulating about political choices, conspiracist beliefs and moral behaviour in uncertain times.

You then write an introduction to explain your rationale and how your publications treat your theme or idea. With a PhD-by-papers format, the introduction is a chance to spell out the narrative of how your papers hang together, and what they advance collectively. I personally found that rewarding and fulfilling to write; you can lose the bigger picture of your project when submerged in incremental day-to-day writing goals, so it is fun and engaging to craft the bigger story of your PhD by penning its introduction. I would recommend keeping this in the back of your mind as you work, so that you can write your introduction towards the end of the process and leave a couple of weeks to enjoy doing so. Synthesising your ideas in a way that guides your examiner into your work is an opportunity to delineate the scope of your research, what its aims are, and how the papers that comprise your PhD-by-papers achieves those ends. It is also a chance to introduce yourself and your own research ambitions into what can be a fairly dry thesis, comprised as it might be of terse and discrete scholarly units. While ‘normal’ doctorates have many embedded opportunities to thread together the narrative arc of the research, in a PhD-by-papers it is in the introduction where you can foreground this kind of discursive architecture. In a PhD-by-papers, the introduction can really ballast and unite the papers of which the thesis is comprised.

The benefits

Overall, doing a PhD-by-papers was the best option for me. For a start, pragmatically, it enabled me to kill two birds with one stone with regard to completing the PhD and getting publications. Publishing during your PhD is a huge advantage and I did not have to find separate time to do this. Nor did I have to return to chapters and convert them to standalone academic papers, which can be an onerous, time-consuming process.

Learning how to write papers that you hope will be published means that you get a head-start on learning and practising the skill of writing to publish, that is, making sure that you are engaging with all the relevant literature for a particular argument you wish to make, and thinking through all the details of that argument in a compelling way. However, I expect that this will strike some as a mixed blessing; publishing is not the be-all and end-all of academic work. Still, writing in the hopes of publishing is a substantial part of academic life, and so working in this way during my PhD meant that I got a realistic taste for life in academia, and I learnt early on that I liked it. This also meant that there was a less significant change in working style when I moved from finishing my PhD to my postdoctoral position.

Besides learning to write to publish, the PhD-by-papers format allowed me to dip into a broader variety of philosophical areas and literatures. I could indulge my developing interests more and pursue what came (sometimes unexpectedly) to be related to my work in some way. For instance, I did not foresee that I would write about conspiracy theories, but I realised that this was an excellent context in which to demonstrate my ideas and their real-world applicability. The spread of COVID-19 and the introduction of lockdown at the time further fuelled my interest in these areas, and doing a PhD-by-papers made it easier to respond quickly to new and popular areas of interest such as these.

In any event, it is good to be able to turn your philosophical skills to prominent real-world events in this way, and present them in a form for non-expert, interested audiences. I suspect that if I had written a thesis with more narrowly focused and tightly interlocking chapters, I wouldn’t have had the breadth to be able to produce some public philosophy so quickly. A final benefit to mention here is that I had standalone chunks of work that I could quickly and easily share with others.

Having said this, the papers that make up a PhD-by-papers need not span as many topics as possible, and it would be a bad idea to try to do so. While there has to be an overarching theme to the papers, the format does give you more freedom to explore parallel debates in an area you’re interested in. A slightly wider repertoire of areas of competence can be a bonus on the academic job market, but so can being associated with expertise in a particular area, so there is a balance to be struck here depending on personal preferences and feasibility. I would put some thought into this balance when considering a PhD-by-papers.

Additional considerations

Many of the benefits I’ve described relate to living like a typical academic from earlier on in your academic career, in terms of writing to publish and writing for wider audiences. However, some might think that a PhD is supposed to be different from that, and that it is a rare and special time to completely focus on writing in depth about a specific thesis – one that is unlikely to come around again. In writing varied papers, I might very well have missed out on getting to know every nook and cranny of the landscape in one particular area. I also haven’t had experience of writing a much longer piece of work (as would be required for a book), so a project of this sort still feels relatively daunting. I’ve no doubt acquired myriad skills from my PhD-by-papers, but I do not have the confidence of someone who set out (and accomplished) a piece of writing tantamount to a monograph. That said, it has helped me become a skilled writer of academic papers.

If you publish early on in your academic career, then you still have a lot of reading and thinking ahead of you and, inevitably, you change your mind about things. There is a risk of being associated with an argument that you do not particularly endorse any more and, quite simply, your skills are likely to have evolved and improved substantially since that time. If you are pressed on an argument that you have moved away from while in your viva, then I would recommend using this an opportunity to paint a compelling picture of how and why you’ve changed your mind. What did you read, and how did you reason about it? People defend the phenomenon of changing your mind about something for good reason: it demonstrates flexibility and responsiveness, so that’s what you should showcase here. Something can of course be very well-argued for but not, in your new view, ultimately correct.

I also suspect that this is just the nature of how ideas unfold over a career. Waiting until you know for sure what you think about something – and that you have read everything – will mean that you never write anything. For me, doing a PhD-by-papers meant that I made peace with these truths (dare I say it) earlier on. I also learnt quickly that I loved doing philosophy and that I have philosophical skills that I am capable of turning towards a wide variety of topics. I honed the particular skill of philosophising in a less content-dependent way. In other words, I developed the global skill of being able to listen to anything and say something interesting.

I did not have to decide right away which kind of PhD I would do, and it was valuable to be able to work naturally for a while and see what happened. PhDs are hard and it’s best to accommodate your natural working style as far as possible. If you find it daunting to write one very long thesis, and you’re interested in doing some broader reading and writing, then a PhD-by-papers could be for you.

Alternatively, perhaps you find the idea of working in a few areas on standalone arguments daunting (I can attest that you can feel like an imposter in each of them!), in which case you might prefer to closely refine one long thesis. Provided you are getting the baseline of experiences required in the field, it’s not ‘cheating’ to do whatever is less daunting.

Kathleen Murphy-Hollies is a Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham on the Wellcome Trust project EPIC. Generally, Kathleen is interested in the social and emotional dimensions of rationality, having worked on confabulation, virtue and psychopathology. She is currently working on epistemic injustice and how it relates to self-knowledge and metaphorical understandings of delusion. You can follow her on Bluesky: @kmurphyhollies.