> today you can self-publish ... your thesis will have to stand or fall on its own merits. It really depends on the OP's goal. I've too often seen snooty acad

> today you can self-publish ... your thesis will have to stand or fall on its own merits. It really depends on the OP's goal. I've too often seen snooty academics who ignore the non-academic literature - even when they know about it. In one case, something like "we are the first to compare X to Y", and when I pointed to two different blog posts, by two different projects, comparing X to Y, and finding the same conclusion as the paper, the corresponding author said something like "that work was insufficiently scholarly". In practice, what happens is that people search for previous work using Google Scholar, or subscription-based equivalents. If they can't find it that way, it doesn't really exist to most of the people who need it. Which means that self-publishing doesn't fall simply on its own merits - it can also fall because it isn't where people are looking.