4 ms·

Depends on what your chosen research is... there is no law stopping PhD candidates from publishing impactful papers.

AussieWog93 6y ago
Of course, it depends entirely on your cohort/field. My point was that it's extremely common for PhD students to just go through the motions and pretend to be doing impactful work. There is at best a tacit approval of treating your studies as "pretend research". At worst, depending on how the grants/scholarships are doled out and the personality of the supervisor, there is active pressure to go down a certain path that both you and your supervisor know will not produce impactful research but instead maximise your probability of publishing a "passable" thesis. This is not in Lesbian Dance Theory, this is in the Faculty of Engineering at a top-ranked university in Australia.
- dasudasu 6y ago
  As a reviewer, it’s when you see one of those papers where the impact is not so clear, and at best is extremely incremental or just a slightly different take on something that has already been done. You can tell a grad student spent a lot of effort to come up with this. If you reject it, you’re just going to make his/her graduation that much harder. It’s like looking at a very involved homework. The alternative is to gatekeep the field a lot more and make people drop from their PhD midway through.
- _jal 6y ago
  > My point was that it's extremely common for PhD students to just go through the motions I think you misspelled 'human'. Of course people do that. And of course there are places to 'practice pretend research' - we've just spent multiple generations flipping universities into something much closer to businesses. Business caters to customers, what do you expect them to do?
- rjsw 6y ago
  I know of a recent Engineering PhD that "discovers" stuff that is already in an international standard, it looks like just going through the motions to me.

Of course, it depends entirely on your cohort/field. My point was that it's extremely common for PhD students to just go through the motions and pretend to be doing impactful work. There is at best a tacit approval of treating your studies as "pretend research". At worst, depending on how the grants/scholarships are doled out and the personality of the supervisor, there is active pressure to go down a certain path that both you and your supervisor know will not produce impactful research but instead maximise your probability of publishing a "passable" thesis. This is not in Lesbian Dance Theory, this is in the Faculty of Engineering at a top-ranked university in Australia.

dasudasu 6y ago
As a reviewer, it’s when you see one of those papers where the impact is not so clear, and at best is extremely incremental or just a slightly different take on something that has already been done. You can tell a grad student spent a lot of effort to come up with this. If you reject it, you’re just going to make his/her graduation that much harder. It’s like looking at a very involved homework. The alternative is to gatekeep the field a lot more and make people drop from their PhD midway through.
_jal 6y ago
> My point was that it's extremely common for PhD students to just go through the motions I think you misspelled 'human'. Of course people do that. And of course there are places to 'practice pretend research' - we've just spent multiple generations flipping universities into something much closer to businesses. Business caters to customers, what do you expect them to do?
rjsw 6y ago
I know of a recent Engineering PhD that "discovers" stuff that is already in an international standard, it looks like just going through the motions to me.