

Advising Students for Success - mad44
http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2009/3/21781-advising-students-for-success/fulltext

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Dilpil
The structure of phd programs highly discourages doing important research.
Important problems carry high risk of getting scooped, but do not offer
proportionally higher upside. The rational course of action is to choose the
most irrelevant and obscure topic possible so as to protect your 5+ year
investment. Real research is the job of tenured professors.

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DTrejo
Do you have any links/advice regarding how to avoid being scooped?

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chris11
Would it help to be entirely open about it? What would happen if you published
every small piece of research that journals would accept, and blogged or self
published the rest?

You might not be the first one to publish results, but you could reasonably
claim that anybody that scooped you would be basing their experiment almost
entirely off of yours, so it would be somewhat of a derivative work. And if
you released a details on your experimental plan, I think that a scientist
would have to design a new experiment if he wanted to say that he wasn't just
testing your hypothesis.

And I think that even if someone did try to scoop you, you would have claim to
enough original research to get a phd.

This strategy might cause you to change your thesis some. But if you are
worried about getting scooped, it might be beneficial to release as quickly as
possible to lay claim to as much research as possible.

I'm just comparing it to the patent system. Companies don't want their ip
infringed, so they file as many patents as possible to get legal rights to
their ip.

