STAR Graduate Student Thesis Policy:
Draft #4


  1. The STAR policy on student theses is based on the principles that any collaborator is free to delve into any aspect of the data, and that the basic arbiter of what constitutes a thesis is the thesis advisor. The main purpose of the policy is to state expectations about communication within the collaboration.
  2. PWG convenors maintain lists of analysis topics in their areas of interest which are not yet covered by anyone (includes students, postdocs, and other categories of collaborator).
  3. Students and their advisors are free to choose a project from any PWG convenor's list, or to propose a new project. The Analysis Coordinator and relevant PWG convenor(s) should be informed when a project is chosen, and kept up-to-date on progress.
  4. The chair of the STAR thesis committee works with the Analysis Coordinator to maintain a descriptive list of all ongoing analysis projects, including names of all students and non-students working on those projects. The STAR council member from each institution is expected to review these listings periodically, and submit the necessary information to keep them up-to-date.
  5. It is anticipated that there will always be many unpursued analysis projects in STAR, and many new analysis opportunities will open up every year as new detector subsystems come online, luminosity improves, etc. The likelihood of independent analyses with a large degree of overlap is small and will probably decrease with time. However, STAR policy does not explicitly discourage duplicate analyses.
  6. In the event that there is a large degree of overlap between two independent analyses, it is the task of an ad hoc godparent committee appointed by the spokesperson to adjudicate differences between the overlapping projects where required, and to assemble the manuscript for a journal publication by drawing on material from the independent analyses.
  7. In overlap cases involving a student thesis project, it is normally expected that the student's advisor will be a member of the godparent committee.
  8. Each student who uses STAR data for his/her PhD thesis is expected to have contributed to a STAR community service project in some significant way. Usually this will be an amount of work roughly equivalent to one third to one half the total research effort for a typical PhD.
  9. Council members are responsible for ensuring that thesis students from their own institutions satisfy community service expectations, and for responding to requests for information about the current service work of thesis students from their institutions.
  10. The STAR roster should include a flag to identify students who intend to use STAR data for a PhD thesis.   Does this need to be written into the STAR policy? If not, it's here just as a reminder to ask Liz to do it.
  11. The STAR thesis committee should review the operation of this policy 18 months after it is put into effect.

Return to STAR thesis committee page


July 26,  2000