6 ms·

Is the doctoral thesis obsolete?

probdist 11y ago
The doctoral thesis already is already essentially universally several papers stapled together in experimental science and engineering. The shortest compelling way to explain your results is a paper. Furthermore, the notion that your work over 3-8 years is one cohesive story has been violated by every graduate student I've ever met.
- fdej 11y ago
  My thesis (in math / CS) was essentially several papers stapled together, except that I made the papers into chapters, expanded/rewrote bits and pieces, and added narrative to glue the chapters together. This took about six months. In retrospect, I think this time was well spent. I developed my understanding of the material quite substantially by reworking it. But doing so was certainly not nearly as fun as writing new papers.
  - mto 11y ago
    Same here except that for me it feels like wasting a lot of time, unlearning all my other skills and not staying up to date with current trends. Having to rewrite polished and reviewed papers is aweful and not publishing stuff (except in a thesis) is unacceptable for many institutions, so I think making papers to chapters is the way to go as long as there isn't something completely different (e.g. no prose but making all data, hardware, software, documentation etc open source)
- tjradcliffe 11y ago
  Depends very much on the field. Everyone I knew in experimental physics was focused on a single experiment or type of apparatus, generally an attempt to measure a single number (or rather, because it was all "physics beyond the standard model", an attempt to set a new limit on a single number.)
- thearn4 11y ago
  Yep, my math PhD was literally 4 submitted papers placed together with an introduction section to the topic area. This wasn't 100% common in my department (US public state university), but my advisor strongly suggested it as the most efficient way to go.
- asabjorn 11y ago
  What constitutes a staple-thesis varies a bit though. My advisor required 3 top-tier papers in a well-defined topic. Papers in other topics or workshop papers does not count.
jessriedel 11y ago
> He would much prefer to see theses’ introductory sections “written along the lines of a good review article, where the student does a critical appraisal of the state of the field”. Yes! A well-written thesis continues to be a very valuable contribution to the literature, but it is the parts that are not original work that are most useful. The reason is that older researchers in a field have almost no incentives to write good and truly introductory review papers, and the introductory sections of a thesis are often the best point of entry. However, most theses are not well written because student don't have much incentive either. > Hence, theses become bloated with “page after page of methods”, along the lines of: “I pipetted 2.5ml of this enzyme into that tube.” Yea, it's boring for professor on the thesis committee to read, but this sort of stuff is very valuable for students and postdocs, who often struggle to reproduce poorly-documented results from other labs. > "Communication within the science world and with the public is becoming shorter and snappier, yet our PhDs still seem to be stuck in the 1960s.” Ahh yes, just what we need. Thesis-by-tweet...
- TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
  Maybe someone should do a PhD to discover if the Tweesis is the future.
- tormeh 11y ago
  >Ahh yes, just what we need. Thesis-by-tweet... Look, a lot of things don't need 100 pages of text. Of course, as a researcher, what you don't want to do is to make your research easy to read, because people may then assume that it was easy to do and therefore not impressive.
  - dustintran 11y ago
    The conundrum during all research talks.
    - semi-extrinsic 11y ago
      No, just add complicated-looking figures and you're fine.
raverbashing 11y ago
Reasons for thesis taking too long (and approximate time dealing with them): - Writer's block: couple of weeks - Dealing with braindead typeset standards, even with things like LateX libraries/helpers (some people still do it in Word): A couple of weeks to months - Dealing with all the citations (because whatever you write, barring the most obvious, has to be quoted): one-two months - Nitpicking by advisor: some weeks
- Rhapso 11y ago
  In this process. Can confirm.
- IndianAstronaut 11y ago
  >Nitpicking by advisor: some weeks Lucky you. I was told to completely redo mine by my advisor.
  - misnome 11y ago
    If you are going and writing the whole thing before showing it to the advisor, it doesn't sound like you were being supervised very well - in physics it seems more common to work on a cycle of writing, showing, rewriting, etc.
  - maccard 11y ago
    My masters thesis content was known long before submission, and had been read at multiple stages by my supervisor before I have him a full "draft".issues that require a full rewrite should be aired at a much earlier stage.
  - rflrob 11y ago
    Lucky you. My advisor has a reputation of not even reading theses (http://www.thespectroscope.com/read/dont-stress-over-your-thesis-no-one-will-read-it-by-lenny-teytelman-318 http://www.thespectroscope.com/read/dont-stress-over-your-th...) which makes it hard to gauge what the thesis should even be.
- danieltillett 11y ago
fnazeeri 11y ago
http://www.nature.com/physics/looking-back/crick/index.html#f1 http://www.nature.com/physics/looking-back/crick/index.html#... Crick et al wrote a 1-page paper (on the structure of DNA) for which they won a Nobel Prize back in 1953.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
  Adding Rosalind Franklin to the author list would have made it too long.
- paulpauper 11y ago
  yeah..observational discoveries are mostly luck, versus the hard, technical skill required to derive something like an equation.
sillypog 11y ago
The UK process is great if the student's goal is to gain a PhD. After approximately 3 years of running experiments, you present your hypotheses and gather together your results and try to make it look like these are related. If the goal is to have an academic career, this is not adequate. Graduating without having results that are good enough to publish in peer reviewed articles puts the UK student far behind others around the world who'll be competing for postdocs. Having moved from a high profile lab in the UK to a high profile lab in the US, I was shocked at how far behind the US/French/German postdocs I was.
- danieltillett 11y ago
  This is so true. A UK PhD is a gloried three year honours degree. Here in Australia traditionally PhDs averaged over 4 years (I took nearly 5 years, but I was working full time for the last 18 months after my scholarship ran out). I knew only one person who finished in the regulation time of three years - most people got most of their results in the last year. When I was an academic my university put great pressure on us to get our students out in under 3 years citing the UK system. Of course when we raised the problems the UK system (ie having our students graduate with no papers) would have on them we were told basically to shut up and do what ever it took to get the students out on time. It became pretty common for supervisors to write their students dissertation and for more senior researchers to 'gift' results to students to get them out on time.
  - mathattack 11y ago
    It became pretty common for supervisors to write their students dissertation Wow! Academic dishonesty just to push people through the system? So much for abusing students as cheap labor!
    - danieltillett 11y ago
      Yep. Just one of the many reasons I am no longer an academic. I should mention that students are still being abused as cheap labor - the only change is the incompetent are getting pushed through.
paulpauper 11y ago
Although my opinion is unsubstantiated, the biggest problem is the barrier of knowledge : it takes longer and longer to familiarize yourself with an increasingly growing body of literature. Second, the low-hanging fruit tends to be picked, leaving researchers fighting for the few undiscovered scraps the remain. Third, papers are getting longer and more technical, with more data and co-authors. Forth, much longer approval times, high submission fees, and much higher rejection rates. Research seems to be a team effort now, of many people collaborating over years to publish papers that are very lengthy and technical that reflect only incremental progress in a field.
- anonymousDan 11y ago
  I think there is always low hanging fruit, you just have to know where to find it. Agreed that publishing papers, especially in top conferences, takes more of a team effort now.
  - robotresearcher 11y ago
    I hope we don't train our young scientists to go after low hanging fruit _exclusively_.
sampo 11y ago
This is only a critique of the monograph-type PhD thesis, which I agree that should become obsolete. Where I come from, a thesis is 3-6 published papers and a 20-60 pages introduction/summary that explains the background a bit more than is traditional in a paper, and summarizes the results. Yes, the student spends 1-3 months writing the summary part, but most of their time is spent on research and writing the actual papers.
stellographer 11y ago
This article seems to adequately describe the definition and obvious shortcomings of the word _thesis_; which is what a _masters_ student should be doing. A _doctoral_ student should be doing a _dissertation_. I'm not sure why so many people want a doctoral degree, as opposed to a masters. It doesn't offer significant financial return on the investment over the masters and it's only really required for entrance to the ivory tower... and once you're there you're going to be dealing with way more B.S. than the horrors of writing an introduction... The entire point of the dissertation is to formulate a complete picture of where things belong and how they interact. It should start from nothing and progress to your contribution. _It should outline pitfalls, mistakes, musings, ideas, future works, etc._ all things which are included in paper publications only minimally (and often requested removed by referees for being off topic!). Yes, it takes 6 months of headbashing LaTeX editing and it comes out with stupid errors on the front page and no one will ever read it besides yourself and your advisors; but that's honestly one of the best lessons you can learn about life in the ivory tower... You _will_ waste months of your life going nowhere, you _will_ have headbashingly mundane paperwork to do more than you like to think, you _will_ screw it up (and need to understand that every paper has some dirty little secret), you _will_ babble on about things no one cares about... That's what being an academic is! If you just care about progress for publications and get a pained feeling when your time appears (appears! every fuck up is a valuable lesson) to have been wasted, then you are not an academic and, yes, the experience will be pointless for you. The truly disgusting thing is these advisors who are streamlining and mechanizing the process. Go ahead and check out which schools pump out the most PhDs per faculty and per time invested (China and India? I'm fairly certain?). Which journals will accept the most articles per time invested (again the same). Are these places onto something no one else is onto? They are capable of producing far more quickly and efficiently than the "archaic" systems... Just wait 5 years and see why that's a mistake.
bsder 11y ago
This infuriates me: "But Leigh argues that unlucky students with no results “shouldn’t be getting a PhD anyway”, since the degree is awarded “for a contribution to knowledge, not for a good try”." Translation: never do work on anything that has even the possibility of failure. Yeah, what a great way to advance knowledge. This is just another extension of "negative results have no value in science".

The doctoral thesis already is already essentially universally several papers stapled together in experimental science and engineering. The shortest compelling way to explain your results is a paper. Furthermore, the notion that your work over 3-8 years is one cohesive story has been violated by every graduate student I've ever met.

fdej 11y ago
My thesis (in math / CS) was essentially several papers stapled together, except that I made the papers into chapters, expanded/rewrote bits and pieces, and added narrative to glue the chapters together. This took about six months. In retrospect, I think this time was well spent. I developed my understanding of the material quite substantially by reworking it. But doing so was certainly not nearly as fun as writing new papers.
- mto 11y ago
  Same here except that for me it feels like wasting a lot of time, unlearning all my other skills and not staying up to date with current trends. Having to rewrite polished and reviewed papers is aweful and not publishing stuff (except in a thesis) is unacceptable for many institutions, so I think making papers to chapters is the way to go as long as there isn't something completely different (e.g. no prose but making all data, hardware, software, documentation etc open source)
tjradcliffe 11y ago
Depends very much on the field. Everyone I knew in experimental physics was focused on a single experiment or type of apparatus, generally an attempt to measure a single number (or rather, because it was all "physics beyond the standard model", an attempt to set a new limit on a single number.)
thearn4 11y ago
Yep, my math PhD was literally 4 submitted papers placed together with an introduction section to the topic area. This wasn't 100% common in my department (US public state university), but my advisor strongly suggested it as the most efficient way to go.
asabjorn 11y ago
What constitutes a staple-thesis varies a bit though. My advisor required 3 top-tier papers in a well-defined topic. Papers in other topics or workshop papers does not count.

jessriedel 11y ago

> He would much prefer to see theses’ introductory sections “written along the lines of a good review article, where the student does a critical appraisal of the state of the field”. Yes! A well-written thesis continues to be a very valuable contribution to the literature, but it is the parts that are not original work that are most useful. The reason is that older researchers in a field have almost no incentives to write good and truly introductory review papers, and the introductory sections of a thesis are often the best point of entry. However, most theses are not well written because student don't have much incentive either. > Hence, theses become bloated with “page after page of methods”, along the lines of: “I pipetted 2.5ml of this enzyme into that tube.” Yea, it's boring for professor on the thesis committee to read, but this sort of stuff is very valuable for students and postdocs, who often struggle to reproduce poorly-documented results from other labs. > "Communication within the science world and with the public is becoming shorter and snappier, yet our PhDs still seem to be stuck in the 1960s.” Ahh yes, just what we need. Thesis-by-tweet...

TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
Maybe someone should do a PhD to discover if the Tweesis is the future.
tormeh 11y ago
>Ahh yes, just what we need. Thesis-by-tweet... Look, a lot of things don't need 100 pages of text. Of course, as a researcher, what you don't want to do is to make your research easy to read, because people may then assume that it was easy to do and therefore not impressive.
- dustintran 11y ago
  The conundrum during all research talks.
  - semi-extrinsic 11y ago
    No, just add complicated-looking figures and you're fine.

raverbashing 11y ago

Reasons for thesis taking too long (and approximate time dealing with them): - Writer's block: couple of weeks - Dealing with braindead typeset standards, even with things like LateX libraries/helpers (some people still do it in Word): A couple of weeks to months - Dealing with all the citations (because whatever you write, barring the most obvious, has to be quoted): one-two months - Nitpicking by advisor: some weeks

Rhapso 11y ago
In this process. Can confirm.
IndianAstronaut 11y ago
>Nitpicking by advisor: some weeks Lucky you. I was told to completely redo mine by my advisor.
- misnome 11y ago
  If you are going and writing the whole thing before showing it to the advisor, it doesn't sound like you were being supervised very well - in physics it seems more common to work on a cycle of writing, showing, rewriting, etc.
- maccard 11y ago
  My masters thesis content was known long before submission, and had been read at multiple stages by my supervisor before I have him a full "draft".issues that require a full rewrite should be aired at a much earlier stage.
- rflrob 11y ago
  Lucky you. My advisor has a reputation of not even reading theses (http://www.thespectroscope.com/read/dont-stress-over-your-thesis-no-one-will-read-it-by-lenny-teytelman-318 http://www.thespectroscope.com/read/dont-stress-over-your-th...) which makes it hard to gauge what the thesis should even be.
danieltillett 11y ago

fnazeeri 11y ago

http://www.nature.com/physics/looking-back/crick/index.html#f1 http://www.nature.com/physics/looking-back/crick/index.html#... Crick et al wrote a 1-page paper (on the structure of DNA) for which they won a Nobel Prize back in 1953.

GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
Adding Rosalind Franklin to the author list would have made it too long.
paulpauper 11y ago
yeah..observational discoveries are mostly luck, versus the hard, technical skill required to derive something like an equation.

sillypog 11y ago

The UK process is great if the student's goal is to gain a PhD. After approximately 3 years of running experiments, you present your hypotheses and gather together your results and try to make it look like these are related. If the goal is to have an academic career, this is not adequate. Graduating without having results that are good enough to publish in peer reviewed articles puts the UK student far behind others around the world who'll be competing for postdocs. Having moved from a high profile lab in the UK to a high profile lab in the US, I was shocked at how far behind the US/French/German postdocs I was.

danieltillett 11y ago
This is so true. A UK PhD is a gloried three year honours degree. Here in Australia traditionally PhDs averaged over 4 years (I took nearly 5 years, but I was working full time for the last 18 months after my scholarship ran out). I knew only one person who finished in the regulation time of three years - most people got most of their results in the last year. When I was an academic my university put great pressure on us to get our students out in under 3 years citing the UK system. Of course when we raised the problems the UK system (ie having our students graduate with no papers) would have on them we were told basically to shut up and do what ever it took to get the students out on time. It became pretty common for supervisors to write their students dissertation and for more senior researchers to 'gift' results to students to get them out on time.
- mathattack 11y ago
  It became pretty common for supervisors to write their students dissertation Wow! Academic dishonesty just to push people through the system? So much for abusing students as cheap labor!
  - danieltillett 11y ago
    Yep. Just one of the many reasons I am no longer an academic. I should mention that students are still being abused as cheap labor - the only change is the incompetent are getting pushed through.

paulpauper 11y ago

Although my opinion is unsubstantiated, the biggest problem is the barrier of knowledge : it takes longer and longer to familiarize yourself with an increasingly growing body of literature. Second, the low-hanging fruit tends to be picked, leaving researchers fighting for the few undiscovered scraps the remain. Third, papers are getting longer and more technical, with more data and co-authors. Forth, much longer approval times, high submission fees, and much higher rejection rates. Research seems to be a team effort now, of many people collaborating over years to publish papers that are very lengthy and technical that reflect only incremental progress in a field.

anonymousDan 11y ago
I think there is always low hanging fruit, you just have to know where to find it. Agreed that publishing papers, especially in top conferences, takes more of a team effort now.
- robotresearcher 11y ago
  I hope we don't train our young scientists to go after low hanging fruit _exclusively_.

sampo 11y ago

This is only a critique of the monograph-type PhD thesis, which I agree that should become obsolete. Where I come from, a thesis is 3-6 published papers and a 20-60 pages introduction/summary that explains the background a bit more than is traditional in a paper, and summarizes the results. Yes, the student spends 1-3 months writing the summary part, but most of their time is spent on research and writing the actual papers.

stellographer 11y ago

This article seems to adequately describe the definition and obvious shortcomings of the word _thesis_; which is what a _masters_ student should be doing. A _doctoral_ student should be doing a _dissertation_. I'm not sure why so many people want a doctoral degree, as opposed to a masters. It doesn't offer significant financial return on the investment over the masters and it's only really required for entrance to the ivory tower... and once you're there you're going to be dealing with way more B.S. than the horrors of writing an introduction... The entire point of the dissertation is to formulate a complete picture of where things belong and how they interact. It should start from nothing and progress to your contribution. _It should outline pitfalls, mistakes, musings, ideas, future works, etc._ all things which are included in paper publications only minimally (and often requested removed by referees for being off topic!). Yes, it takes 6 months of headbashing LaTeX editing and it comes out with stupid errors on the front page and no one will ever read it besides yourself and your advisors; but that's honestly one of the best lessons you can learn about life in the ivory tower... You _will_ waste months of your life going nowhere, you _will_ have headbashingly mundane paperwork to do more than you like to think, you _will_ screw it up (and need to understand that every paper has some dirty little secret), you _will_ babble on about things no one cares about... That's what being an academic is! If you just care about progress for publications and get a pained feeling when your time appears (appears! every fuck up is a valuable lesson) to have been wasted, then you are not an academic and, yes, the experience will be pointless for you. The truly disgusting thing is these advisors who are streamlining and mechanizing the process. Go ahead and check out which schools pump out the most PhDs per faculty and per time invested (China and India? I'm fairly certain?). Which journals will accept the most articles per time invested (again the same). Are these places onto something no one else is onto? They are capable of producing far more quickly and efficiently than the "archaic" systems... Just wait 5 years and see why that's a mistake.

bsder 11y ago

This infuriates me: "But Leigh argues that unlucky students with no results “shouldn’t be getting a PhD anyway”, since the degree is awarded “for a contribution to knowledge, not for a good try”." Translation: never do work on anything that has even the possibility of failure. Yeah, what a great way to advance knowledge. This is just another extension of "negative results have no value in science".