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Is the doctoral thesis obsolete?

timeshighereducation.co.uk

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Re: Is the doctoral thesis obsolete?

#21

Post by danieltillett »

sillypog wrote: post #16

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…

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.

Re: Is the doctoral thesis obsolete?

#22

Post by shasta »

tormeh wrote: post #6
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…

>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.

If you're simple, clear and first, you're going to get plenty of citations, though.

Re: Is the doctoral thesis obsolete?

#23

Post by _delirium »

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…

Yes, if anything we need better documentation of methods. This is something often overlooked with the open-scientific-data movement also: data on its own is not very useful (in the sense of being insufficient to draw valid conclusions) if you don't have good documentation of how precisely it was collected, which is critical to interpreting it correctly... otherwise you just have some numbers in a CSV file. Traditionally PhD theses are one of the few places that really exhaustively documents what exactly they did and how, while papers tend to gloss over a lot of things. There's been a little noise about that [1], but not a lot of movement so far.

I do think a movement of theses away from monograph-style to collection-of-articles style is okay, though.

[1] http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2014/11/18/nevermind-the-...

Re: Is the doctoral thesis obsolete?

#24

Post by maccard »

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.

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.

Re: Is the doctoral thesis obsolete?

#25

Post by robotresearcher »

sillypog wrote: post #16

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…

This was not my experience. My UK Computer Science peer group was expected to publish their thesis work in a good journal, with some conference papers along the way. The thesis was the definitive long-form version, but a key question at the defence was "so where was this work published?". "It wasn't" would not have been a good answer.

Expectations may vary by school.

Re: Is the doctoral thesis obsolete?

#26

Post by thearn4 »

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.

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.

Re: Is the doctoral thesis obsolete?

#27

Post by pvaldes »

tormeh wrote: post #6
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…

>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.

> As a researcher, what you don't want to do is to make your research easy to read

Mmmh.. Disagree. This is the same idea as those software that nobody wants to explain you what does exactly, and therefore don't get a lot of customers using it after the novelty wears off. This is a red flag for mediocrity for me. Of course you should aim to get so many readers as possible.

Re: Is the doctoral thesis obsolete?

#28

Post by anonymousDan »

paulpauper wrote: post #18

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 appr…

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.

Re: Is the doctoral thesis obsolete?

#29

Post by rflrob »

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.

Lucky you. My advisor has a reputation of not even reading theses (http://www.thespectroscope.com/read/dont-stress-over-your-th...) which makes it hard to gauge what the thesis should even be.

Re: Is the doctoral thesis obsolete?

#30

Post by danieltillett »

robotresearcher wrote: post #25
sillypog wrote: post #16

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…

This was not my experience. My UK Computer Science peer group was expected to publish their thesis work in a good journal, with some conference papers along the way. The thesis was the definitive long-form version, but a key question at the defence was "so where was this work published?". "It wasn't" would not have been a good answer. Expectations may vary by school.

They vary by area because of the nature of research.

It is much harder in the experimental sciences to "schedule" results. My PhD has both experimental (lab work) and computing aspects and all the computing research took within the expect time (+- 20%). The lab aspects were much more variable. I had one experiment which I expected would take 3 months to finalise that worked first time and I was finished by the afternoon (this doesn't happen that often unfortunately), while other experiments I thought would take a week ended up taking 6 months.

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