Close Home Forum Sign up / Log in

PhD Issues

M

So I have competed a PhD in science at a major research university and am doing a post doc that is going much better than it was 3 weeks ago.

However, I am wondering what to do if it turns out that something P produced for my thesis is not 100 % reproducible when other scientists try and run the same code and/or if it turns out I made computing mistakes that may change my thesis and how valid it was.

Basically, the project involved taking a highly complex code written by a computer scientist, without comments or clear organization, comprehending ti and restructuring it to make various computations for analysis. It is possible that a fit value I calculated was not being done 100 % correctly because the code needed to be rewritten in a way that neither I nor the computer scientist who wrote it were aware of at the time and so I would need to make the necessary adjustments. There's a good chance this is not the case but it is possible. Also, for one condition, I got a fit value of 1.45 after a number of runs and someone else may get repeated runs of something like 1.75, 1.69 or 1.58, in part because the procedure uses semi random processes.

I am worried about the possibility to either discovering something I did not realize as a graduate student and needed to fix it in later publications, or having someone else rerun the procedure and get somewhat different values as I mentioned above and this being used as grounds to revoke my PhD. It is also possible that since the procedure had about 50 or so steps that I may have accidentally overlooked 1-2 of the 50 steps being done a certain way that may result in slightly different values when someone tries to replicate what I did.

There was no plagiarism anywhere in my thesis and no made up data. All the runs in the thesis were actually done and all the fit values and functions used in the thesis were authentically generated and there was no doctoring the results by artificially making them lower or replacing a given data set with a lower value to make it look better. In fact the PI even expressed some concern at one point about the values i was getting but I maintained that these are the true values and did not doctor it at all.

In light of this how plausible would it be to have a PhD revoked on grounds of the university being angry about the fact that I did not realize something was missing in the code the computer scientist sent or being angry that my results are not 100 % duplicable? Should I really be thinking about how to address this?

T

I wouldn't worry, I'm sure everyone has errors in their thesis. I've never heard of cases where theses are revoked because of this.

I'm writing a paper based on my thesis data now, and I can see that I missed some data off a table, meaning the percentages I reported in the thesis are wrong, but I have amended them for the paper. Don't see what else I can do now!

43888