Student Theses

Introduction

Three types of student theses can be added to Pure at this stage: Master Theses, Master-after-Master Theses and Doctoral Theses. While CALI is the authentic source for all information regarding theses, they can be added to Pure, to both the thesis author's and the jury members' or adviser's benefit. However, the thesis module as it is implemented at the moment has some limitation, making data entry and data reuse not straightforward. While there are support tickets logged with Elsevier, we can not definitively say when the issue will be resolved completely. Nevertheless, we have found some workarounds, which make it possible to enter theses and show them on the Pure portal.

Legacy theses

When we migrated the theses from R&D-net into Pure, all participants (i.e. both the author and the associated advisers and jury members), were migrated as Authors. Their role in the thesis was made clear by adding a role. Upon the go-live, the Supervisor tab which we requested did not yet exist, so people entering theses were forced to also add promoters, advisers and jury members under the Author heading.

Registering a thesis this way makes it possible to report on the thesis (both for students and staff members), but has one drawback: when searching in the portal, it looks like the jury members are co-authors:

While the roles are explicitly shown when navigating to the detail page, some advisers found this confusing and misleading and asked for a different method of displaying theses.

The supervisor tab

In an attempt to solve the issue, a Supervisor tab was created by Elsevier. This means it is now possible to separate jury members and the actual author. The Supervisor tab accepts both internal and external persons and it is possible to have only an external person as author. This allows for the registration of external theses as well (even though technically this is not a supported use case and which necessitates the addition of an internal organisation):

While this seemingly works, there are two problems with this approach: 1) a thesis which only has the jury members under the Supervisor tab does not appear in the list of theses in the jury member's account. In the overview it is counted towards the total, but it is not displayed, 2) similarly, such a thesis is not shown on the portal page of the promoter or adviser. This is a bug and an issue has been raised with Elsevier, but so far we are still waiting for a solution.

Ideally, a thesis which only has the author under the Author tab and the jury members under the Supervisors tab would appear on both author's and jury members' profiles, both in Pure and on the portal. Since this is not the case today, we can only advise to include the jury members under the Author tab. However, we remain hopeful that this issue will be solved and invite you to also include the jury members under the Supervisor tab, as to minimize rework once the issue has been solved.