Is the doctoral thesis obsolete? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is the doctoral thesis obsolete?

#11

Post by bkcooper » Thu, May 21, 2015, 9:12 PM UTC

jessriedel wrote: post #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…

Good comment. My addendum to follow is not directed to you, but to non-scientific readership.

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.

There's both absolute and relative poor documentation. The brevity of most scientific publishing (coupled with the lack of any sort of external incentive for clarity, as you point out) means that even papers that are good, by the standard of scientific papers, can be a real bear to turn into working examples. I personally feel that a lot of what makes various labs good is knowledge of the things that aren't going into the papers. A dissertation, with (potentially) a lot more room to go into details, can serve both as a source of this information for external readers, as well as a convenient internal reference for people in the lab who need to dig up some details of their prehistory.

edit: to clarify, my perspective on this is coming from physics. In other fields, there's more of an emphasis on explicit protocols and "methods sections" that presumably help with this sort of thing.

Re: Is the doctoral thesis obsolete?

#12

Post by semi-extrinsic » Thu, May 21, 2015, 9:13 PM UTC

dustintran wrote: post #9

tormeh wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

No, just add complicated-looking figures and you're fine.

Re: Is the doctoral thesis obsolete?

#13

Post by GFK_of_xmaspast » Thu, May 21, 2015, 9:16 PM UTC

fnazeeri wrote: post #8

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.

Adding Rosalind Franklin to the author list would have made it too long.

Re: Is the doctoral thesis obsolete?

#14

Post by fdej » Thu, May 21, 2015, 9:23 PM UTC

probdist wrote: post #2

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.

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.

Re: Is the doctoral thesis obsolete?

#15

Post by IndianAstronaut » Thu, May 21, 2015, 9:29 PM UTC

raverbashing wrote: post #4

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 week…

>Nitpicking by advisor: some weeks

Lucky you. I was told to completely redo mine by my advisor.

Re: Is the doctoral thesis obsolete?

#16

Post by sillypog » Thu, May 21, 2015, 9:33 PM UTC

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.

Re: Is the doctoral thesis obsolete?

#17

Post by tjradcliffe » Thu, May 21, 2015, 9:34 PM UTC

probdist wrote: post #2

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.

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.)

Re: Is the doctoral thesis obsolete?

#18

Post by paulpauper » Thu, May 21, 2015, 9:34 PM UTC

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.

Re: Is the doctoral thesis obsolete?

#19

Post by paulpauper » Thu, May 21, 2015, 9:38 PM UTC

fnazeeri wrote: post #8

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.

yeah..observational discoveries are mostly luck, versus the hard, technical skill required to derive something like an equation.

Re: Is the doctoral thesis obsolete?

#20

Post by misnome » Thu, May 21, 2015, 9:44 PM UTC

IndianAstronaut wrote: post #15

raverbashing wrote: post #4

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 week…

>Nitpicking by advisor: some weeks Lucky you. I was told to completely redo mine by my advisor.

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.