One thing to note here is that India has massive credential over demand. An international hotel can require Master’s degrees in English for its front desk staff. So it doesn’t matter that these PhDs can’t do original research because 99% of them won’t be.
The first publication related to my thesis appeared nearly a year and a half after I graduated. Part of the reason is that, at least in pure math, it might take 3-6 months to receive a rejection!
I made the error, early in my PhD, of naming the git repo for one of my papers "prestigiousJournalYearX". It didn't end up in that journal, and it took something like two years more than Year X. Not a good idea, with the constant reminder of falling short of your earlier goals, and I never could get myself to rename it either.
I regard 3-6 months as pretty good for journals. In CS competitive journals can take a year to reject something. Even if a paper is accepted, and the period of time from submission to publication can sometimes take close to 2 years.
US universities seem to do fine without a government-mandated Ph.D. publication requirement.
However, helping grad students publish and present their work in a high-quality, peer-reviewed context is one of the most important things that graduate advisors can and should do. I am certainly OK with institutions making that a requirement for advisors.
US system computes hell out of statistics for ranking and validation of quality. Other countries, including India or China, has no such things. There, universities/institutes are "ranked" by sort of public perception and media image. It is not uncommon in these countries to buy PhD degrees by simply contracting ghost writers and/or publish in to shady for-fee publications. Government mandates have typically evolved in these countries for a reason.
This seems like a poor answer to the wrong question. The problem is not that students are being preyed on by publishers, the real question is why they aren't publishing in reputable journals and conferences.
I was a volunteer for the IEEE SoutheastCon one year. It was amazing; almost none of the authors showed up for the conference. It was enough for them to get the publication and enough for the IEEE that they'd payed the registration fee.
I have mixed feelings on this. On one hand, I like most things that involve moving away from the publish or perish culture in academia. On the other hand, this doesn't seem to be a productive way to do that. This seems to be trying to attack poor quality publishers through an indirect method which likely will not solve the problem - people are still incentivized to publish in other ways and the root cause needs to be hit to make any real progress. I also think that having at least one publication during an entire PHD is not an unreasonable request - ending publish or perish shouldn't be pursued by trying to curtail the importance of publishing overall since it is still a critical part of the scientific process. There need to be good journals that accept null results and in progress results and replication studies so scientists can continue to be incentivized to share their work without forcing them to build their life around achieving something "publishable" in the current paradigm.
A PhD in a scientific or engineering discipline is a certification that you know how to conduct research and communicate the research you conducted. Papers are the evidence people use to assess that ability. Graduating without them makes it unclear what was accomplished and if the necessary skills were acquired. Informally, most top programs in the US have students produce 2-6 original papers to graduate, which varies per discipline. Without publications, it will be very hard for graduates to get a job doing research, which is the main career door that a PhD opens.
I assume that thought process was what motivated the policy forcing people to publish to graduate. However, very low quality publications are equally useless and do not showcase one's ability to do research, so just requiring publications isn't sufficient. A PhD student's committee is supposed to assess if they have demonstrated the ability to do good research and add to humanity's knowledge. It doesn't sound like that is happening appropriately.
Look - it's straightforward, is there a genuine contribution, is the thesis of sufficient quality to effectively communicate that - there's the standard. Who cares what random referees have / have not decided about the work if you are examining it?
Ultimately, someone has to make a judgement call whether there is a genuine contribution or not. Ideally, the committee can serve in this role, but there is a possibility that their views are biased or uninformed. This can be countered by the external validation offered by refereed publications.
Edit: I absolutely recommend the change suggested in the article. In contrast to many other programs, many Indian universities commonly do not support student travel costs for presenting research. A hard requirement for two conference papers means that poorly-paid Indian graduate students are either (A) limited to publishing in relatively-affordable but less prestigious local conferences, or (B) taking on significant personal expense to meet this requirement.
By lifting this requirement, students could publish exclusively in journals, for example, which do not have a presentation component. Allowing individual institutions to have more control over these requirements makes more sense, in my view.
For comparison, my US-based institution requires only a single publication (conference or journal) prior to graduation; this is meant to address the external validation problem mentioned above without discouraging students who want to work on extremely hard, extremely time-intensive projects that might produce fewer publications than "hot" topics could.
Not sure what profession you refer to but in physics you publish to specialized journals in your field of research. The referees typically have some, if not a lot of expertise. It's not like a random guy is giving a thumbs up or down. It is a critique of your scientific work.
Having been a referee for a long time I can tell you that so much submissions are just minuscule variations on existing papers that are sugar-coated to be ohh so important contributions to the field that it is mind boggling. And if you decline it, they try the next journal with a lower impact factor until they get published.
Wouldn't it be somewhat better to maintain a list of international peer reviewed papers for each discipline?
My country (Italy) has something of the sort for evaluating prospective full-time researchers. It doesn't even really need to be based on impact factor, especially in what are considered non-bibliometric disciplines like humanities.
It's important to note that publishing a paper can take quite a long time. For instance, it quite commonly takes 2+ years to publish in JASA, the premier statistics journal.
I agree with the others who say that publication is an important aspect of doctoral education. However, grad students already face too many sources of risk and delay. I've known a number of PhDs who had to deal with professors holding back on letting them graduate in order to get one or more papers out of them, at enormous expense to the student, and after the dissertation work was finished. In one case, a student had to lawyer up.
I also know one professor who simply can't bring himself to let anything be published, and a student shouldn't be penalized for that.
The professors who review the student's dissertation should be able to decide if the work is of publication quality. The dissertation is still the main focus of the PhD.
I'd like to see more professional, terminal (doctorate) degrees that aren't PhDs. Run them in parallel. For instance, I feel there should be an M.Eng. equivalent for comp sci that requires mastery of existing theory instead of development of new theory.
That's literally what a PhD is for - the fact that you're an expert in your field and breaking new ground. Wouldn't a masters in comp sci be the equivalent to a masters in engineering? You can get a PhD in engineering as well.
Exactly. There is something dearly missing between Masters to PhD. Many European PhDs are now 3 years while US PhD tends to be 5 year. It would have been great if PhD degree standardized to 5 years but was broken down into two separate degrees of 2+3 years.
Although the time to completion seems quite disparate between Europe and US, the difference isn't nearly as stark as it appears.
Nearly all Europeans enter PhD programs with a Master's degree in hand. At least in psychology (my discipline), US PhD programs will admit candidates directly from undergraduate. The overall time from bachelor's to PhD is similar when you account for these differences.
That proposal basically lowers the value of an Indian Ph. D. If you already have one and had to publish, you should be upset at a proposal to have your existing credentials blemished in this manner.
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