"Actually, we will read your thesis" by Neel Krishnaswami https://semantic-domain.blogspot.com/2023/09/actually-we-will-read-your-thesis.html
"whenever I find a paper I don't understand, I start looking for the PhD thesis based on it. Nine times out of ten, the thesis is vastly more understandable: "obvious" lemmas will have explicit proofs, algorithms will have detailed pseudocode, and the right intuitions and perspectives to take about the topic will be spelled out."
Can relate. A colleague of mine, Stefan Pulver, once mentioned to me the "strategic reserve of Michael Bate's lab PhD student theses" as something of wonder – he was a postdoc in that lab. Huge amounts of data not deemed splashy enough for publication but full of details and caveats and protocols for studies of #Drosophila larvae #neuroscience.
@albertcardona I often look for theses when I'm preparing an interview, there's a lot of great stuff that doesn't make it into the paper, there's often a well written intro with a more personal point of view - and the acknowledgements are often great for a human interest angle
