I am having a bit of a crisis at the moment and any advice would be more than welcome. I am in second year of my PhD and essentially someone has just published their PhD from Germany in my exact area-a very small area of law. I had a look through the material and our stuff is similar to about 50%. I am discussing points that the other has not and also doing mine as a comparative. I have 30,000 words written so far. My work is original in that no one was doing this before but now there is a book on it, literally. Also my points on some things are different to the other person's.
Should I speak to my supervisor and try to rejig the thesis or am I better saying nothing? I may be overreacting but I just don't want this to be a problem in the viva.

You definitely need to speak to your supervisor about this. It's not necessarily a problem but you will need to put a different spin on your work to ensure it stays original. You can't get a PhD on the exact topic that someone else has already published.

A similar thing happened to me at a roughly similar time in my part-time PhD. I spoke to my supervisor, and he reassured me. So don't worry, you will be fine. But you need to take care to distinguish what is original about your work. And if all else fails it is perfectly fine for two people to (independently) cover the same area. There was a significant overlap between my PhD and the other person in my case, in terms of source material analysed etc.

And in case I wasn't very clear in my last message: *do* speak to your supervisor about this, and get their advice about the best way ahead. But do not worry.

Thanks guys for the help. I am going to speak to my supervisor later. I think I may have been panicking a little more than I should have. It was such a shock seeing the exact same thing nearly in my area, which has not been covered before at all. I think it is separate enough in one sense, in that mine has other issues dealt with and different conclusions, but parts of mine look like they could have been lifted from the other work.

Actually if I could just bug you about one more issue. In my School we have been told not to publish anything until the PhD is done. They say that we could be accused of plagiarising our own work and be denied the PhD in the viva. They have no specific examples of this happening. I was talking to a post-doc who thought this was very odd and said he would judge a candidate's possibility of employment based upon research published. as anyone come across this before?

This happened to a colleague of mine who close to the end, found he'd replicated the work of another group. In such circumstances, you need to acknowledge the other gorup's work and look at areas which differentiate your work from theirs. Doing this can allow your thesis to be seen to build on their work and take that forward to develop it. Alternatively, duiring your critical assessment of their work (as you are supposed to do with all relevant literature) you can identify weaknesses that your own work seeks to address.

In my colleague's case, he was given a six month extension with funding (his supervisor admitted a little self-blame for the situation when they discussed it and should have picked up on this other group's work). That allowed him to run a few extra experiments to truely differentiate his work from that of the other group.

I think your supervisor will probably offer similar advice when you speak to them and it may even be an advantage to you this has happened as you may end up with a stronger thesis as a result.

Hope that helps.

Ian (Mackem_Beefy)

You have had very good advice here, particularly from Ian. This other work could strengthen your PhD in that you have a different slant on it (as long as you acknowledge them as Ian rightly suggests). The fact others have started to work on this area you could argue that growing interest in the subject validates your reasoning for choosing the topic as it's current/topical.

Maybe the person at your uni was refering to someone who has published work and submitted in the wrong format. At my uni you have to apply for permissions to submit your thesis in the form of journal articles as an 'alternative method',otherwise, yes you can get into trouble over it but it's fine to write your thesis in a traditional manner and then publish parts of it along the way as journal articles, which will have a different layout to your thesis.

:-)

Thanks for the replies everyone. I have just met with my supervisor over the previously published work and he was concerned. I threw up the points that others made here and he seemed content enough.
As for the publishing and plagiarising of your own work, I am a little more concerned. The man who said it to us often acts as an internal examiner for the viva.
Thanks for the help!

It seemed a strange remark to me. He is one of the internal examiners of the viva process and said he has actually refused students on that basis and told them to rewrite sections. When asked about publishing he said that we shouldn't bother and "get on with the business of being a research student". I found it an odd remark to make as well as I thought I may publish 3 or so articles from the entire thesis. At this point I am kind of afraid to to be honest in case he is on the viva committee.