Strange doctoral dissertation!

These days i found several strange Phd theses on the website of the Plasma & Coatings Physics group of Linkoping University, Sweden. <http://cms.ifm.liu.se/materialphysics/plasma/publications/>.

At a glance, the length of the dissertation is abnormal short compared with that we usually see, ranging from 40 to 70 pages, and there are few experimental data or graph through the text although it also divived into several chapters. They just gave out the list of their published papers in the beginning of the thesis. Thus, these dissertations look like a review rather than a normal thesis. Prof. Helmersson's group is a reputed group in thin film technology, especially in HIPIMS which is the lastest generation of magnetron sputtering technique and originated from this Lab in 1999. Why do they choose the abnormal arrangement, "a review" instead of "a thesis"? I think that it is of advantaged to give the reader a integral development of this field, clear exhibit their contributions to this field, and let us know what has been done, what they did, and what should do in the future. Of course, maybe we have the courage to take this form only when we are sure that we contributed to one field indeed.