Can collection of work become a PHD thesis in Bioinformatics

Question

[crivenster]

Hi,I am second year student doing PhD in Bioinformatics. I had been working on many projects ,mostly involved in tool development and web server/database related applications. Some works involved both analysis and development. Now i wonder what kind of structure does the thesis should be based on? I see many examples on web are based on single project topic often. Till now all the works i have done has been in the microbiome domain,so should the thesis in general be single topic or can be combinations of all the projects that i have done ? As they are the research works that i have done during the study period.

[ATpoint]

Now i wonder what kind of structure does the thesis should be based on?

While you will probably get many valuable comments here, eventually the only truly relevant answer to this is the one from your professor who eventually will decide whether he/she accepts your thesis or not, therefore I strongly recommend to simply talk to them, better sooner than later because if there are any problems you should sort them out early rather than a few weeks before the planned submission.

Answer 1

[GenoMax]

PhD theses in different parts of the world are not judged by the same metric and don't work in the same way. Ultimately it is up to you to put a story together (chapters may not be related, if you can't help it). Your mentor (and your PhD committee, if one exists) and external referees (I see you are from India) need to accept that story. If that happens then a collection of works like you describe will let you earn a PhD.

Answer 2

[jared.andrews07]

At least in the US, many PhD dissertations span multiple projects (e.g. each chapter will cover a different project). Typically, these projects are still related to each other, but there is no reason you can't put multiple projects into your dissertation. Even for work that isn't complete or doesn't have quite enough content for a full chapter, you can still put them in as appendices.

As for how it should be structured, that really depends on your program - they will likely have guidelines as to how the document itself should be laid out. You can also pose this question to your program advisors/leaders, and they will likely have more specific advice for you.