I guys, hope someone can help me. I am writing my PhD thesis as collection of articles since during my phd I basically published all the results I got. At the moment I have anyway some doubts on my thesis because it contains no new contents or results respect to my publications. Did someone have my same experience? Am I doing somenthing wrong?
Looking forward for suggestions or comments.
Thank you all :)

Hi. This is perfectly normal. What you need to do is to write a coherent thesis which relates the chapters and the results to the original problem. If I like a work done by a paper by a PhD student, sometimes I search for the thesis of this student hoping to find more details about the work. So it is perfectly fine.

That's right! You're not expected to have novel papers and novel thesis - the novel papers make the novel thesis! If this helps, my thesis was like this:

Introduction chapter
Paper 1
Paper 2
Paper 3
Paper 4
Discussion chapter

All my papers weren't published (just in case anyone thinks I'm bragging, ha) - I just stuck with the paper format once I'd decided on it even though it became apparent that I would probably only submit one of the papers.

Good luck!!

Tudor_Queen, did you use the discussion chapter to talk do a meta analysis of your work or just discuss the work in general? I am thinking of doing something similar but not sure if I can use that discussion chapter to make new conclusions or do I have to stick strictly to my chapters.

Same here. All my thesis chapters were from my published works with the exception of a theoretical background chapter.
I rephrased each paper to avoid any nonsense over "self plagiarism".

Hi Rewt, I made my Discussion chapter short and sweet. It was a summary of the studies and what they found (couple of pages), followed by a summary of the limitations, a summary of the implications, and a summary of directions for future work. Each of these sections of my discussion largely regurgitated what what was in the discussion sections of the papers, but in more of a synthesised way - that is, linking things across the papers and with some additional novel and overarching thoughts that sort of helped wrap it together and make it a cohesive whole. So in a nutshell, my discussion did add something new - in terms of bringing everything together - the sum being more than the individual parts kind of thing. It was only 14 pages long (Times font size 12 and with double spacing!) and was my fave part of the thesis!

Hi Rewt, I hope you get to do it in the way that best suits your work. At the start of my final year, I decided I wanted to do the traditional format after all. But my supervisor strongly suggested that I stick to the paper format. I remember that she emailed me with a list of reasons why she thought I should. Maybe you could think about why you want to do the paper format and then explain the reasons to your supervisor to see if he/she agrees / can see the benefit?