
Is the doctoral thesis obsolete? - franzpeterstein
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/features/phd-is-the-doctoral-thesis-obsolete/2020255.fullarticle
======
jessriedel
> 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...

~~~
tormeh
>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.

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

~~~
seanmcdirmid
For CS? Not in your thesis, but maybe in a paper based on the thesis.

~~~
sampo
In natural sciences, thesis is based on papers. In CS, paper is based on
thesis.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Both actually. Its just that your thesis won't get many if any non-self
citations, even if it is really good. People will cite your paper, which they
bother to take time reading (hopefully).

------
probdist
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.

~~~
fdej
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.

~~~
mto
Same here except that for me it feels like wasting a lot of time, unlearning
all my other skills and not staying up to date with current trends.

Having to rewrite polished and reviewed papers is aweful and not publishing
stuff (except in a thesis) is unacceptable for many institutions, so I think
making papers to chapters is the way to go as long as there isn't something
completely different (e.g. no prose but making all data, hardware, software,
documentation etc open source)

------
sillypog
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.

~~~
danieltillett
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.

~~~
mathattack
_It became pretty common for supervisors to write their students dissertation_

Wow! Academic dishonesty just to push people through the system? So much for
abusing students as cheap labor!

~~~
danieltillett
Yep. Just one of the many reasons I am no longer an academic. I should mention
that students are still being abused as cheap labor - the only change is the
incompetent are getting pushed through.

------
bsder
This infuriates me:

"But Leigh argues that unlucky students with no results “shouldn’t be getting
a PhD anyway”, since the degree is awarded “for a contribution to knowledge,
not for a good try”."

Translation: never do work on anything that has even the _possibility_ of
failure.

Yeah, what a great way to advance knowledge.

This is just another extension of "negative results have no value in science".

------
paulpauper
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.

~~~
anonymousDan
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.

~~~
robotresearcher
I hope we don't train our young scientists to go after low hanging fruit
_exclusively_.

------
stellographer
This article seems to adequately describe the definition and obvious
shortcomings of the word _thesis_; which is what a _masters_ student should be
doing. A _doctoral_ student should be doing a _dissertation_.

I'm not sure why so many people want a doctoral degree, as opposed to a
masters. It doesn't offer significant financial return on the investment over
the masters and it's only really required for entrance to the ivory tower...
and once you're there you're going to be dealing with way more B.S. than the
horrors of writing an introduction...

The entire point of the dissertation is to formulate a complete picture of
where things belong and how they interact. It should start from nothing and
progress to your contribution. _It should outline pitfalls, mistakes, musings,
ideas, future works, etc._ all things which are included in paper publications
only minimally (and often requested removed by referees for being off topic!).

Yes, it takes 6 months of headbashing LaTeX editing and it comes out with
stupid errors on the front page and no one will ever read it besides yourself
and your advisors; but that's honestly one of the best lessons you can learn
about life in the ivory tower... You _will_ waste months of your life going
nowhere, you _will_ have headbashingly mundane paperwork to do more than you
like to think, you _will_ screw it up (and need to understand that every paper
has some dirty little secret), you _will_ babble on about things no one cares
about... That's what being an academic is!

If you just care about progress for publications and get a pained feeling when
your time appears (appears! every fuck up is a valuable lesson) to have been
wasted, then you are not an academic and, yes, the experience will be
pointless for you.

The truly disgusting thing is these advisors who are streamlining and
mechanizing the process. Go ahead and check out which schools pump out the
most PhDs per faculty and per time invested (China and India? I'm fairly
certain?). Which journals will accept the most articles per time invested
(again the same). Are these places onto something no one else is onto? They
are capable of producing far more quickly and efficiently than the "archaic"
systems...

Just wait 5 years and see why that's a mistake.

------
sampo
This is only a critique of the monograph-type PhD thesis, which I agree that
should become obsolete.

Where I come from, a thesis is 3-6 published papers and a 20-60 pages
introduction/summary that explains the background a bit more than is
traditional in a paper, and summarizes the results.

Yes, the student spends 1-3 months writing the summary part, but most of their
time is spent on research and writing the actual papers.

------
raverbashing
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 weeks

~~~
IndianAstronaut
>Nitpicking by advisor: some weeks

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

~~~
rflrob
Lucky _you_. My advisor has a reputation of not even reading theses
([http://www.thespectroscope.com/read/dont-stress-over-your-
th...](http://www.thespectroscope.com/read/dont-stress-over-your-thesis-no-
one-will-read-it-by-lenny-teytelman-318)) which makes it hard to gauge what
the thesis should even be.

------
fnazeeri
[http://www.nature.com/physics/looking-
back/crick/index.html#...](http://www.nature.com/physics/looking-
back/crick/index.html#f1)

Crick et al wrote a 1-page paper (on the structure of DNA) for which they won
a Nobel Prize back in 1953.

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

