Hello everyone, I was just wondering whether it was the norm to put ALL the results you obtain during your PhD into the thesis? Like, if you get a post doc lined up, with a deadline for submission, can leave some bits out, and maybe write them up in paper form at a later date? How much is enough god damn it! Cheers

Never having been fortunate enough to gather enough data to write a paper, I was nonetheless under the impression that there was nothing wrong in writing papers using data from your thesis.

You shouldn't, of course, re-use data in more than one paper, but given that the chances of the wider community reading your thesis are, alas, slim, I think it's permissible to rebrand the data for a wider audience. You'd have to rewrite the text, but that's good practice for adapting to another audience anyway. Certainly there seems to be no problem incorporating data from your own papers into a thesis, so I can't see why there would be an objection the other way around.

It's quite common to leave some of the data for use later - there are even some short postdoc awards specifically designed to support the further milking of your PhD data after submission. I have quite a lot of further analysis that could be done later, that was either too tangential or just too time-consuming to do for submission. If I'm fortunate enough to get a post doc, I don't know if I'll ever actually get around to following through on those aspects though.

The hard part is deciding, as you say, how much is enough.

Thanks Smilo, thats great to know :-)