Hi everyone,
I am a third-year PhD student. I have published two papers and I have finished writing my thesis. But something got wrong in my relationship with my supervisor. I am working on astrophysics and my supervisor's field of research is condensed matter physics. When I begun research I made it clear to him that I needed a supervisor not to help me in my research but only to take care of the administration papers. He recently claims however that it is impossible for a PhD student to defend his thesis if his published papers were authored solely by the student and the supervisor does not appear as a co-author. Please tell me if this is true.
Please tell me also if there exists in the world a country where a hard working student can get a PhD by working on his own, publishing and writing his dissertation, without any supervisor so that I can go there to finish my PhD. Thank you very much in advance.

This doesn't really pass the "sniff test" (or B.S. test if you prefer) for me. Check the regulations at your school. I know that at mine, I can submit my thesis without my supervisor's approval. It is not advised, but it is possible. They should have a copy online and also with the administration team.

at my uni you can submit without the supervisor, although its not advisable as wanderingsage says.

My hubby submitted with minimal supervision - the supervisor helped him with the topic choice and in the first year saw about 2 bits of work and made a few verbal comments about it - no written feedback at all. THen he stopped answering emails when my hubby had to go to work full time after his stipend finished. So I helped hubster get it all together, the sup never read anything past a draft of one study, the rest we just had to wing it and hope it was PhD standard. We used other peoples theses to make sure we were along the right lines in terms of depth of content, type of info to include etc. but essentially did it without any help. He recently passed with about 3 minor corrections e.g. "move table 3 onto the next page" type corrections. So it is doable.

On my submission form I had to sign to say that my supervisor was aware of the thesis submission.  Each uni will be different though.

As for publications, it is usual that the supervisor is present as an author or that the uni is cited as a collaborating party to the research. With publications it will be down to the intellectual property rights on the work and as a student of a uni, the uni usually has some ownership.  That said PhD students do pass with no publications at viva but go on to publish later on. Your publications just demonstrate the quality of the work if in reputable journals.

I am not sure what you are questioning, ie your supervisors lack of input but you did state that you only wanted minimal assistance from them at the beginning.  Your sup may have a valid point about being an author (depending on IP) but I am not sure this would fail your PhD. A PhD needs to be through a university, and the establishment has a responsibility to provide a supervisor for guidance.  I am not aware that you can do it all alone regardless of how hard working! I think at this late stage you would find it difficult to change uni as it would appear that you are looking at submission very soon.

I totally agree with Dunni. Also, even if your supervisor was completely useless, it is always a good idea to submit with his signature than without. You are going to be examined by other academics, and not having his support may not reflect favourably, although as Sneaks as pointed out, it is not essential.

I believe that for science-based PhD is normal to publish papers with your supervisor as co-author, but this is not the case in the Humanities.

I think that - as you are close to the end - it would be wise to maintain a civil relationship with him, as you will probably need his references afterwards anyway.

Yes in humanities it is not normal for supervisors to be co-authors. I had 2 journal papers published during my part-time PhD (history), both sole-authored by me. And now I'm publishing more as a post-doc, and they're still sole-authored.

At my university a supervisor has to sign off the thesis before submission. I don't think we can submit without a supervisor doing that. You need to check the rules at your university.

yep, agree with Dunni and Corinne, while it is possible to work without your sup, I don't think its advisable if you can avoid it. My hubby's sup will still be a co-author and he's a nice enough bloke, just wasn't bothered in the slightest about the thesis, but crucially, he did agree to the submission and was happy enough for it to go in - just had never read it!

I think if anything its kind of just polite to put them as a co-author, in my field anyway. I also know of one person who did submit without the supervisors permission and he had to re-do about half the thesis and re-viva.

I think a supervisor should only be down as a co-author if they have contributed to the research described in a significant way. My journal articles during my PhD were written totally by me, on research I did with virtually no input from my supervisor, not even discussion about it as it was ongoing. In sciences it's a formality to have a supervisor as a co-author even in those circumstances. Personally I think that's daft.

My supervisor has published research where I've been employed as a research assistant doing all the legwork in the historical archives. But I'm not a co-author there, and wouldn't expect to be, even though that's a stronger case than him being co-author on mine. He did all the analysis for those papers, so he's the author. I like that system.

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Hi everyone,
Thank you all very much guys for your advices and enlightening comments.