Trouvé au hasard d’une recherche sur le format et la nature des thèses, cet article sur la baisse de l’impact scientifique des thèses en format électronique a soulevé mon intérêt. On peut y lire que scholars prefer to cite published papers and books derived from graduate research, rather than the original theses, y compris les articles composant une thèse.
Mais surtout, l’article met en évidence que le principal avantage d’un dépôt institutionnel pour les thèses électroniques réside dans la possibilité pour un candidat au doctorat de vérifier l’originalité d’un sujet ou d’une question de recherche :
There is an argument for their development based on the intrinsic requirement of a thesis or dissertation, i.e. that it should be an original piece of work. Currently, it is very difficult, if not impossible, for students undertaking postgraduate studies to be confident that no other student around the world has covered a particular niche of research. In this respect, e-thesis repositories would play a very important role in allowing new researchers to search for and examine examples of “prior art”, and it is likely, although not by any means certain, that this would increase the number of references to theses made by graduate
Source : Larivière, Vincent, Zuccala, Alesia et Archambault, Eric. The Declining Scientific Impact of Theses: Implications for Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repositories and Graduate Studies. Scientometrics, January 2008, Volume 74, Issue 1, pp 109-121
