Is it possible to get a PhD by writing only review and survey papers?

It is possible to get a PhD without writing any papers; the formal requirement is of writing a thesis, and many people do just that. So I think the formulation of your question is a bit misleading.

But cutting to what I think is the actual intent behind your question rather than the specific choice of words, the answer is almost certainly that you cannot get a PhD without doing original research. Just making expositions of research already done by others, no matter how detailed or how many citations you get for them, is not what a PhD is about and wouldn’t satisfy the requirements.


The naive answer is yes. All you have to do is convince a panel that what you did warrants a PhD. This will be different for each school/department/panel/student. Typically this requires contributing something novel to the field. Something novel does not have to be a research paper.

A couple examples:

  • A colleague wrote a review where he extracted related data from a multitude of papers. He did this for a single minor figure in his review. Turns out others wanted that data already aggregated and it spawned many more research papers. He ended up creating a website/database and maintained it throughout the rest of his PhD. This database was a significant portion of his PhD (and probably his strongest portion).

  • Another colleague created a machine to automate a particularly labor intensive process in the lab (2 years of development). This was then used by many other researchers in their own novel research papers. Again this became a large portion of his PhD, and made him very popular among those who wanted to use it.

It doesn't have to be a research paper but it does need to be novel and contribute to the field. A review in and of itself is not necessarily novel, but it can be. As @JonCuster pointed out, the 'new' stuff was not the review nor a research paper but new tools that helped the community do further research.


Information Systems professor here. I chair a dissertation every year or two. Short answer is no.

(1) You need to prove that you can independently execute the scientific method and complete a sufficiently complex research project that extends the body of knowledge in your area.

(2) I wouldn't be doing you any favors if I let you leave the program without a good body of work that you could use for conference papers and grant proposals.