I think publishing multiple good articles should be encouraged over a traditional PhD thesis. It's obviously possible to get a PhD from publishing articles thes

I think publishing multiple good articles should be encouraged over a traditional PhD thesis. It's obviously possible to get a PhD from publishing articles these days but at least here (Germany) it's the exception, not the rule. I wouldn't mind removing the PhD thesis all together and relying on articles instead. It's more agile to borrow from software engineering. Article, feedback, improve on your works beats working on a monograph as a general setup in my opinion. It's not as rosy as this though, the journal/conference industry is pretty broken but in an ideal world with excellently peer reviewed open access everywhere breaking your research into smaller chunks than a PhD is better imho. It should also be noted that even if you go the traditional PhD thesis route you'll usually publish articles as well and most good PhD programs will make sure you communicate your PhD work regularly. But I think there's too many cases of scientists basically locking themselves away to write the thesis and only turning in the final product, mostly talking to their advisor.