Q:

How to force phdthesis bib entry to expand to Ph.D. (and not to PhD) in the bbl?

The bib entry:
@phdthesis{w-ieaem-07,
  author      = {Ron Wein},
  title       = {The Integration of Exact Arrangements with Effective Motion Planning},
  school      = {Tel Aviv University},
  year        = {2007}
}

expands to:
\bibitem{w-ieaem-07}
R.~Wein.
\newblock {\em The Integration of Exact Arrangements with Effective Motion Planning}.
\newblock PhD thesis, Tel-Aviv University, Israel, 2007.

in the bbl file. How can I enforce 
\newblock Ph.D. thesis, Tel-Aviv University, Israel, 2007.

?

A:

It seems that you are using the standard \bibliographystyle{plain} command. In this case there's little you can do, since the PhD is hard wired into plain.bst. 
A solution is to copy the file plain.bst as, say, xplain.bst in your work directory, edit it to change the (unique) string PhD into Ph.D. and call
\bibliographystyle{xplain}

in your document.

A:

You can override this with the "type" field in the .bib file:
  type = {{Ph.D.} Dissertation},

Simplest solution if it is just a few entries.  I have this line in all my theses in my bib file so I don't have to worry about what will happen by default.  (Works for any bib style I have tried, including plain.)

