Is the doctoral thesis obsolete?
timeshighereducation.co.uk
Is the doctoral thesis obsolete?
1–10 of 52 posts
Re: Is the doctoral thesis obsolete?
#2The 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.
Re: Is the doctoral thesis obsolete?
#3> 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...
Re: Is the doctoral thesis obsolete?
#4Reasons 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
Re: Is the doctoral thesis obsolete?
#5> 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…
Maybe someone should do a PhD to discover if the Tweesis is the future.
Re: Is the doctoral thesis obsolete?
#6> 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…
>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.
Re: Is the doctoral thesis obsolete?
#7> 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…
Re: Is the doctoral thesis obsolete?
#8http://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.
Re: Is the doctoral thesis obsolete?
#9> 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…
>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.
The conundrum during all research talks.
Re: Is the doctoral thesis obsolete?
#10Reasons 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 week…
In this process. Can confirm.