5 ms·

Will That Be Trash or Credit?

88 points by jawns 14y ago

a_bonobo 14y ago
First of all, the link's title is misleading, a PhD-candidate is usually a first year PhD-student, the text doesn't say anything about that. Second, is the story supposed to be true or just a story? "Yet my friend, whom we’ll call Ben, was set to do just that." - the whole thing reads more like a setup to the book the article is trying to push.
- bedris 14y ago
  ...a PhD-candidate is usually a first year PhD-student... This is actually not true. PhD students have to advance to candidacy, which requires completing a set amount of coursework and passing a qualifying exam; this usually takes 1-2 years. Therefore, most first-year PhD students are not yet PhD candidates.
  - abhaga 14y ago
    > PhD students have to advance to candidacy, which requires completing a set amount of coursework and passing a qualifying exam This varies from university to university. Some of them do not have the qualifier exams and you are working towards your PhD from day one. Although there is usually some amount of course work still involved as overall requirements for graduating.
    - bedris 14y ago
      Fair enough. Every program I was accepted to, though, did not grant you candidacy from the start as you first had to complete your courses and pass one or more exams.
      - abhaga 14y ago
        I went to CMU LTI and they don't have a candidacy exam. As per this link: http://www.cs.uccs.edu/~gsc/phdProgramComparison.htm http://www.cs.uccs.edu/~gsc/phdProgramComparison.htm UTA and UMD don't have one. I checked Univ of Edinburgh and INRIA across the pond and they also don't seem to have one. All this is for the computer science PhD programs only. Things may be different for pure sciences.
        excuse-me 14y ago
        A few British universities did have candidacy. There was a financial penalty from the research council if a certain percentage of your students didn't finish in 3 or 4 years - so the university would make everyone a candidate and only count them as a PhD student for the stats once it looked like they would do OK. Eventually this evolved to being a candidate right up to when you submitted so there was a 100% completion rate but the research councils wised up to the scam.
    - xamuel 14y ago
      Everywhere I've been, "candidate" is a technical term and first-years are definitely NOT. But even if there are universities where you become a candidate upon admission, presumably you remain a candidate all the way to the end, so "...a PhD-candidate is usually a first year PhD-student..." is STILL quite wrong.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
uvdiv 14y ago
One of the linked stories is much more interesting: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/12/science/notebooks-shed-light-on-an-antibiotic-discovery-and-a-mentors-betrayal.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/12/science/notebooks-shed-lig... Apparently Selman Waksman's 1952 Nobel in medicine is fraudulent, and it was his grad student who made the discovery (isolation of the antibiotic streptomycin -- first treatment for tuberculosis). He falsely claimed to have done it himself and slandered his student to discredit him.
- streptomycin 14y ago
  Here is Schatz's side of the story, which based on my readings about the case seems entirely true (and thus motivated my username selection): http://www.albertschatzphd.com/?cat=articles&subcat=streptomycin&itemnum=001 http://www.albertschatzphd.com/?cat=articles&subcat=stre...
- chrischen 14y ago
  So what did they do about the Nobel prize awarded to Waksman? I can see why people like Grigory Perelman have an anti-awards stance: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/07/02/mathematician-rejects-prize-of-1-million-cash/ http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/07/02/mathematician-rejects....
hpatel 14y ago
Credit and recommendation are fundamental to any human endeavor - whether applied to Ph.D candidates, poverty and access to capital, patents, or a plethora of other complex societal issues. If nothing else, I always find it interesting to learn how different sections of the society deal with these issues. Though, I did like the other PhD article(http://www.pgbovine.net/PhD-memoir/pguo-PhD-grind.pdf http://www.pgbovine.net/PhD-memoir/pguo-PhD-grind.pdf) on HN better as it provides a more balanced story.
- chris_wot 14y ago
  I wonder if Ph.D candidates in Psychology whose dissertations are on credit and recommendation ever have these issues?
  - iamumassthrower 14y ago
    meta!
  - hpatel 14y ago
    Just cuz you understand the system, doesn't mean you are free from it.
kghose 14y ago
One of the things that struck me while I was reading the article (besides the subliminal implication that go-getter graduate students all read Science!) is that while I new of all the discoveries mentioned, I didn't know any of the discoverers. I use MRI, but I know the company that makes the machines and the software, not which obscure dude in some corner of the world first published the technique. This is something that is common to all human existence. Enjoy your work and your own accomplishments. Don't worry too much about the adulation from others, especially strangers. It is fleeting, quickly forgotten, and there is that six month rule about adapting to whatever new level of fame/wealth you attain, so that you keep wanting more. PS. Another point, PhDs in the UK and Germany often take 3 years. It's only in the US that the concept of keeping graduate students on leash for more that six years has been honed to an art.
- simonbarker87 14y ago
  3 years is supposed to be the aim but most in the UK will still take 4 or 5. I've seen many a PhD student forced to experiment right up to the end of year 3 and been told to not start writing up until the start of 4. At which point they are banned from the lab and then given minimal support to complete in a decent timeframe.
- mccr8 14y ago
  I believe that in the UK students have a master's degree before starting a PhD program (whereas in the US they usually don't), so it isn't quite comparable.
  - arethuza 14y ago
    "I believe that in the UK students have a master's degree before starting a PhD program" Definitely not true - unless this has changed recently. I went pretty much directly from a 4 year BSc(Hons) to working as an Research Associate while attempting a PhD.
    - mccr8 14y ago
      Interesting. My only source for this is the book "How to Get a PhD" by Phillips and Pugh.
xamuel 14y ago
This is one of the worst articles I've ever seen posted at HN. All seven of the writer's (extremely paranoid and passive aggressive) tips could be obsoleted by one single alternative: post your paper on the arXiv. The author seems to have a tinfoil-hat-tier view of science, and has absolutely no business selling a book to grad students. The seventh tip in the article ("be male") makes me wonder whether this writer has any experience at all doing science in the past twenty years (he mentions Rosalind Franklin, 1920-1958, way to be contemporary!)
- T-A 14y ago
  1) How do you know the subject matter is one of those covered by the arXiv? 2) How do you know the student has posting rights? Those require endorsement by an authorized poster, which would be most likely to contact the PI if asked. 3) Even if posted to the arXiv, a paper can be removed by the moderators. 4) What do you think would happen to the student if he posted the paper to the arXiv without the PI's consent? Conclusion: yours is one of the worst comments I've ever seen posted at HN.
- streptomycin 14y ago
  > All seven of the writer's (extremely paranoid and passive aggressive) tips could be obsoleted by one single alternative: post your paper on the arXiv. That's incredibly naive. If you make a breakthrough discovery in biology and you unilaterally post it on arXiv (or wherever) before submitting it to a journal, your advisor will probably strangle you, at best.
  - regehr 14y ago
    I'm a professor. If my student unilaterally posted something on arXiv, I would strangle him/her, at best.
    - iamumassthrower 14y ago
      ... and what's your opinion of this story professor jack ripper?
- 14y ago
zitterbewegung 14y ago
I don't have these trust issues with my professor over my research project... we understand that we will post to ArXiv when the research is done. I think you should try to pick not just good research projects but also good people. I started off knowing this professor by going to his office hours. I would ask questions and he would answer. As I got to know him I realize that he was very nice. Paranoia is a part of research though. You have to realize that what you are working on you don't really want to get scooped though. You do want to keep your research projects "secret" until they are done. This means until you have figured out whats unique you shouldn't post to arxiv. But, you are free to tell others. Due to the fact that we hear about events like this in news sources it shows that plagarism and issues of who gets credit are relatively rare. For the most part science does give credit where its due. That doesn't mean it could be better. There is a stark disconnect between grad students and professors. Why don't we value grad students more anyways? Aren't they creating the future? Shouldn't they make at least $30k? I guess we just want them to live a bohemian lifestyle until they graduate. Or they must have rich parents to support them until they are self sufficient.
droithomme 14y ago
Sucks to be this guy, but that's academia for you and the described situation is not surprising at all. Academia has all the petty jealousy and small town politics of rural hick towns populated by the Hatfields and McCoys. Given that it's a total wash out, this guy should name and shame.
- iamumassthrower 14y ago
  ... because no one in the private sector steals credit for someone else's work
impendia 14y ago
As an academic in math (perhaps the lab sciences are different, I speak only for what I know), I find this absurd. Perhaps mathematicians are nicer than other academics, but within math I have never heard firsthand of any story of this kind. The advice given is breathtakingly cynical. You take risks by sharing your accomplishment, yes, but if you don't describe your accomplishment to others then you are depriving yourself of oxygen. Communication is the lifeblood of science, and in math at least, others are 1000x more likely to help you than to screw you over. I would recommend, to anyone pursuing a Ph.D. in math at least, that they categorically ignore this advice. Hell, I'm confused as to why anyone prepared to believe this would want to get a Ph.D. at all.
- ajdecon 14y ago
  I've seen these sorts of things happen, and had one paper where the author list was a subject of much debate. Though it seems much more common in the life sciences.
- bluekeybox 14y ago
  As someone who spent time with both biology and computer science PhDs, every bit of that article is true when applied to biology (much less so in computer science, and probably none of it applies to math). Actually it gets worse in biology than what the article describes. There are networks of "friends" established across the country which survive by sharing credit as much as possible. (Someone should write a paper on how such cliques get established -- it is almost like Darwinian evolution, except the other way around.) Members of those cliques often have impressive publication records, but when you start drilling down to what their individual contribution was to each paper, you start believing that you are watching some circus unfold in front of you. In an individual lab, members of such cliques can achieve significant power and influence (since friends know tricks to get paper closer to publication) even despite the fact that their individual ability to interpret experimental data is often very unimpressive to put it nicely.
- Estragon 14y ago
  I have a PhD in Applied Math from one of the Math departments in the country, and now do biomedical research. Believe me, the cynicism is well placed. I wanted to get a PhD because I believed as you do. The fact is, though biomedical research is a field where cheating can take you a long, long way. The experiments have gotten so big and expensive that scientific accountability is at an all-time low (for example, check out this commentary [1] on pre-clinical cancer research. And the money in biomedical research attracts power-hungry people. At the same time, the pressure to publish in order to obtain grant funding is enormous, and the incentives to cheat to get ahead by e.g. playing games with credit or retarding competitors with sly reviews is correspondingly intense. [1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7391/full/483531a.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7391/full/483531a... TLDR: drug company attempts to replicate results of high-impact cancer biology research papers, in a search for new drug targets. Failed to replicate the claims in 47 out of 53 papers. Authors refused to provide materials necessary for replication until company signed NDA stating they would not publish the results of the replication attempts. One author tells the head of the replication effort "Well, we only got this result 1 time out of 5 repetitions, but we decided to report the 1 instead of the other 4, because it's the better story." (NDA story is from the subsequent Nature clarification, sentence 4 is from a news report on the commentary.)
HackersCapital 14y ago
The conclusion of the article is sad - the great scientist is becoming a lawyer. There are already too many lawyers http://abovethelaw.com/2011/06/the-oversupply-of-lawyers-in-america/ http://abovethelaw.com/2011/06/the-oversupply-of-lawyers-in-...
smallblacksun 14y ago
"Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low." -Sayre
bhickey 14y ago
Franklin didn't share in the 1962 Nobel for the simple reason that she was dead.

88 points by jawns 14y ago

First of all, the link's title is misleading, a PhD-candidate is usually a first year PhD-student, the text doesn't say anything about that. Second, is the story supposed to be true or just a story? "Yet my friend, whom we’ll call Ben, was set to do just that." - the whole thing reads more like a setup to the book the article is trying to push.

bedris 14y ago
...a PhD-candidate is usually a first year PhD-student... This is actually not true. PhD students have to advance to candidacy, which requires completing a set amount of coursework and passing a qualifying exam; this usually takes 1-2 years. Therefore, most first-year PhD students are not yet PhD candidates.
- abhaga 14y ago
  > PhD students have to advance to candidacy, which requires completing a set amount of coursework and passing a qualifying exam This varies from university to university. Some of them do not have the qualifier exams and you are working towards your PhD from day one. Although there is usually some amount of course work still involved as overall requirements for graduating.
  - bedris 14y ago
    Fair enough. Every program I was accepted to, though, did not grant you candidacy from the start as you first had to complete your courses and pass one or more exams.
    - abhaga 14y ago
      I went to CMU LTI and they don't have a candidacy exam. As per this link: http://www.cs.uccs.edu/~gsc/phdProgramComparison.htm http://www.cs.uccs.edu/~gsc/phdProgramComparison.htm UTA and UMD don't have one. I checked Univ of Edinburgh and INRIA across the pond and they also don't seem to have one. All this is for the computer science PhD programs only. Things may be different for pure sciences.
      - excuse-me 14y ago
        A few British universities did have candidacy. There was a financial penalty from the research council if a certain percentage of your students didn't finish in 3 or 4 years - so the university would make everyone a candidate and only count them as a PhD student for the stats once it looked like they would do OK. Eventually this evolved to being a candidate right up to when you submitted so there was a 100% completion rate but the research councils wised up to the scam.
  - xamuel 14y ago
    Everywhere I've been, "candidate" is a technical term and first-years are definitely NOT. But even if there are universities where you become a candidate upon admission, presumably you remain a candidate all the way to the end, so "...a PhD-candidate is usually a first year PhD-student..." is STILL quite wrong.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

uvdiv 14y ago

One of the linked stories is much more interesting: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/12/science/notebooks-shed-light-on-an-antibiotic-discovery-and-a-mentors-betrayal.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/12/science/notebooks-shed-lig... Apparently Selman Waksman's 1952 Nobel in medicine is fraudulent, and it was his grad student who made the discovery (isolation of the antibiotic streptomycin -- first treatment for tuberculosis). He falsely claimed to have done it himself and slandered his student to discredit him.

streptomycin 14y ago
Here is Schatz's side of the story, which based on my readings about the case seems entirely true (and thus motivated my username selection): http://www.albertschatzphd.com/?cat=articles&subcat=streptomycin&itemnum=001 http://www.albertschatzphd.com/?cat=articles&subcat=stre...
chrischen 14y ago
So what did they do about the Nobel prize awarded to Waksman? I can see why people like Grigory Perelman have an anti-awards stance: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/07/02/mathematician-rejects-prize-of-1-million-cash/ http://www.dailyfinance.com/2010/07/02/mathematician-rejects....

hpatel 14y ago

Credit and recommendation are fundamental to any human endeavor - whether applied to Ph.D candidates, poverty and access to capital, patents, or a plethora of other complex societal issues. If nothing else, I always find it interesting to learn how different sections of the society deal with these issues. Though, I did like the other PhD article(http://www.pgbovine.net/PhD-memoir/pguo-PhD-grind.pdf http://www.pgbovine.net/PhD-memoir/pguo-PhD-grind.pdf) on HN better as it provides a more balanced story.

chris_wot 14y ago
I wonder if Ph.D candidates in Psychology whose dissertations are on credit and recommendation ever have these issues?
- iamumassthrower 14y ago
  meta!
- hpatel 14y ago
  Just cuz you understand the system, doesn't mean you are free from it.

kghose 14y ago

One of the things that struck me while I was reading the article (besides the subliminal implication that go-getter graduate students all read Science!) is that while I new of all the discoveries mentioned, I didn't know any of the discoverers. I use MRI, but I know the company that makes the machines and the software, not which obscure dude in some corner of the world first published the technique. This is something that is common to all human existence. Enjoy your work and your own accomplishments. Don't worry too much about the adulation from others, especially strangers. It is fleeting, quickly forgotten, and there is that six month rule about adapting to whatever new level of fame/wealth you attain, so that you keep wanting more. PS. Another point, PhDs in the UK and Germany often take 3 years. It's only in the US that the concept of keeping graduate students on leash for more that six years has been honed to an art.

simonbarker87 14y ago
3 years is supposed to be the aim but most in the UK will still take 4 or 5. I've seen many a PhD student forced to experiment right up to the end of year 3 and been told to not start writing up until the start of 4. At which point they are banned from the lab and then given minimal support to complete in a decent timeframe.
mccr8 14y ago
I believe that in the UK students have a master's degree before starting a PhD program (whereas in the US they usually don't), so it isn't quite comparable.
- arethuza 14y ago
  "I believe that in the UK students have a master's degree before starting a PhD program" Definitely not true - unless this has changed recently. I went pretty much directly from a 4 year BSc(Hons) to working as an Research Associate while attempting a PhD.
  - mccr8 14y ago
    Interesting. My only source for this is the book "How to Get a PhD" by Phillips and Pugh.

xamuel 14y ago

This is one of the worst articles I've ever seen posted at HN. All seven of the writer's (extremely paranoid and passive aggressive) tips could be obsoleted by one single alternative: post your paper on the arXiv. The author seems to have a tinfoil-hat-tier view of science, and has absolutely no business selling a book to grad students. The seventh tip in the article ("be male") makes me wonder whether this writer has any experience at all doing science in the past twenty years (he mentions Rosalind Franklin, 1920-1958, way to be contemporary!)

T-A 14y ago
1) How do you know the subject matter is one of those covered by the arXiv? 2) How do you know the student has posting rights? Those require endorsement by an authorized poster, which would be most likely to contact the PI if asked. 3) Even if posted to the arXiv, a paper can be removed by the moderators. 4) What do you think would happen to the student if he posted the paper to the arXiv without the PI's consent? Conclusion: yours is one of the worst comments I've ever seen posted at HN.
streptomycin 14y ago
> All seven of the writer's (extremely paranoid and passive aggressive) tips could be obsoleted by one single alternative: post your paper on the arXiv. That's incredibly naive. If you make a breakthrough discovery in biology and you unilaterally post it on arXiv (or wherever) before submitting it to a journal, your advisor will probably strangle you, at best.
- regehr 14y ago
  I'm a professor. If my student unilaterally posted something on arXiv, I would strangle him/her, at best.
  - iamumassthrower 14y ago
    ... and what's your opinion of this story professor jack ripper?
14y ago

zitterbewegung 14y ago

I don't have these trust issues with my professor over my research project... we understand that we will post to ArXiv when the research is done. I think you should try to pick not just good research projects but also good people. I started off knowing this professor by going to his office hours. I would ask questions and he would answer. As I got to know him I realize that he was very nice. Paranoia is a part of research though. You have to realize that what you are working on you don't really want to get scooped though. You do want to keep your research projects "secret" until they are done. This means until you have figured out whats unique you shouldn't post to arxiv. But, you are free to tell others. Due to the fact that we hear about events like this in news sources it shows that plagarism and issues of who gets credit are relatively rare. For the most part science does give credit where its due. That doesn't mean it could be better. There is a stark disconnect between grad students and professors. Why don't we value grad students more anyways? Aren't they creating the future? Shouldn't they make at least $30k? I guess we just want them to live a bohemian lifestyle until they graduate. Or they must have rich parents to support them until they are self sufficient.

droithomme 14y ago

Sucks to be this guy, but that's academia for you and the described situation is not surprising at all. Academia has all the petty jealousy and small town politics of rural hick towns populated by the Hatfields and McCoys. Given that it's a total wash out, this guy should name and shame.

iamumassthrower 14y ago
... because no one in the private sector steals credit for someone else's work

impendia 14y ago

As an academic in math (perhaps the lab sciences are different, I speak only for what I know), I find this absurd. Perhaps mathematicians are nicer than other academics, but within math I have never heard firsthand of any story of this kind. The advice given is breathtakingly cynical. You take risks by sharing your accomplishment, yes, but if you don't describe your accomplishment to others then you are depriving yourself of oxygen. Communication is the lifeblood of science, and in math at least, others are 1000x more likely to help you than to screw you over. I would recommend, to anyone pursuing a Ph.D. in math at least, that they categorically ignore this advice. Hell, I'm confused as to why anyone prepared to believe this would want to get a Ph.D. at all.

ajdecon 14y ago
I've seen these sorts of things happen, and had one paper where the author list was a subject of much debate. Though it seems much more common in the life sciences.
bluekeybox 14y ago
As someone who spent time with both biology and computer science PhDs, every bit of that article is true when applied to biology (much less so in computer science, and probably none of it applies to math). Actually it gets worse in biology than what the article describes. There are networks of "friends" established across the country which survive by sharing credit as much as possible. (Someone should write a paper on how such cliques get established -- it is almost like Darwinian evolution, except the other way around.) Members of those cliques often have impressive publication records, but when you start drilling down to what their individual contribution was to each paper, you start believing that you are watching some circus unfold in front of you. In an individual lab, members of such cliques can achieve significant power and influence (since friends know tricks to get paper closer to publication) even despite the fact that their individual ability to interpret experimental data is often very unimpressive to put it nicely.
Estragon 14y ago
I have a PhD in Applied Math from one of the Math departments in the country, and now do biomedical research. Believe me, the cynicism is well placed. I wanted to get a PhD because I believed as you do. The fact is, though biomedical research is a field where cheating can take you a long, long way. The experiments have gotten so big and expensive that scientific accountability is at an all-time low (for example, check out this commentary [1] on pre-clinical cancer research. And the money in biomedical research attracts power-hungry people. At the same time, the pressure to publish in order to obtain grant funding is enormous, and the incentives to cheat to get ahead by e.g. playing games with credit or retarding competitors with sly reviews is correspondingly intense. [1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7391/full/483531a.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7391/full/483531a... TLDR: drug company attempts to replicate results of high-impact cancer biology research papers, in a search for new drug targets. Failed to replicate the claims in 47 out of 53 papers. Authors refused to provide materials necessary for replication until company signed NDA stating they would not publish the results of the replication attempts. One author tells the head of the replication effort "Well, we only got this result 1 time out of 5 repetitions, but we decided to report the 1 instead of the other 4, because it's the better story." (NDA story is from the subsequent Nature clarification, sentence 4 is from a news report on the commentary.)

HackersCapital 14y ago

The conclusion of the article is sad - the great scientist is becoming a lawyer. There are already too many lawyers http://abovethelaw.com/2011/06/the-oversupply-of-lawyers-in-america/ http://abovethelaw.com/2011/06/the-oversupply-of-lawyers-in-...

smallblacksun 14y ago

"Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low." -Sayre

bhickey 14y ago

Franklin didn't share in the 1962 Nobel for the simple reason that she was dead.