
No paper, no PhD? India rethinks graduate student policy - NN88
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01692-8
======
light_hue_1
This is a huge step backward for Indian science and it's really sad to see.
India already is far behind China and not even comparable to the US or Europe.
Now they'll fall far further behind.

You don't get your PhD in US/Canadian/European universities without
publications. Not in physics, math, cs, psychology, neuroscience, etc.
Publications don't just show you can do things, but they hold your advisers to
account to make sure they're also pushing out new ideas, they hold entire
departments to account. If a department can't produce enough new ideas and
research to get 1 paper per PhD student out, then they are failing and should
be dealt with by the university administration. Failing to graduate PhDs is a
critical metric in finding such problems and dealing with them.

What this does is just entrench India's failure in the research world. Lazy
senior researchers will get lazier. Young researchers will have far less
incentive to keep moving. Departments won't be held to account anymore. And
low-quality PhDs will keep being minted.

I'm not a fan of publish or perish, and it's damned stressful sometimes. But 1
paper per PhD student is not a burden. It's a bare minimum and advisers should
be ashamed if this is all that they can publish with a student through their
PhD.

India is pumping out huge amounts of junk research, mediocre PhDs, and is just
stagnant overall in research. This is short sighted, lazy, and will hurt
everyone there.

~~~
jldugger
> You don't get your PhD in US/Canadian/European universities without
> publications.

This is not a national requirement however. I bet you could find a PhD
granting institution in the US that doesn't require publication.

Moreover, there's spillover effects from requiring this; I'm told in China
that medical journals are facing a dire problem of research fraud, due to
research publications being tied to promotions in the medical community
([https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736\(15\)60700-0/fulltext)).
It seems reasonable to assume incentivizing publications will reduce the
quality of publications, whether the incentive is a promotion or a degree.

The question I have though, is what harm there is in reverting to a socially
enforced standard. It's pretty easy to screen out PhD applicants without a
publication, and I don't know of anyone who's too busy churning through PhDs
to give their scholarly output at least a brief glance. If the screening
device is available cheaply, who is harmed by this legislation?

~~~
egocodedinsol
FWIW that social standard, and the mindset behind it can really penalize some
fields. FWIW, in some fields of neuroscience it is common even for very
successful phds to not publish before defense, and a single paper requires
massive amounts of work, while other neuro fields churn out short paper after
short paper because the culture is focused that way, and the experiments less
time consuming.

It puts some students at a severe disadvantage for hiring because they get
screened out because they chose a field that publishes 50 page papers instead
of 2 page papers.

~~~
jldugger
Is it common to see people hiring the category of 'PhD in anything at all' and
not 'PhD in neuroscience or highly related subject?'

~~~
egocodedinsol
I'm saying that even within neuroscience there is large variation in
publication frequency and expectation.

So if person from neuro discipline A and neuro discipline B are applying for
the same job in data science, discipline A could get screened out because they
spent years training a monkey to do a brain machine interface task while
person B published five fMRI papers in three years. Neither candidate is going
to use their specific neuro expertise, but rather their general data science
skill set. One will be at a huge disadvantage unless she is hired directly by
people who know her field.

------
kevinventullo
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_!

~~~
semi-extrinsic
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.

------
mcguire
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.

~~~
physicsguy
In my field it’s standard that if you don’t show up, your paper is not
published in proceedings - and normally those proceedings are in an IEEE
Transactions journal.

~~~
mcguire
There's apparently quite a bit of difference between the single-subject
conferences and the regional, general conferences. The latter are primarily
about funding the regional groups, while the former are only partially about
funding the groups (yeah, I'm still bitter about ICDCS '98).

------
anbop
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.

~~~
booleandilemma
So pretty much where the US is headed then?

(I’ve met a technical support person with a master’s degree in CS)

~~~
malshe
I met an Uber driver who was doing his PhD in CS and specifically in machine
learning!

~~~
slashcom
That should tell you how grad students are paid.

------
musicale
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.

~~~
sytelus
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.

~~~
jldugger
> 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.

Having worked in university administration, I can assure you these two things
are not so different after all. US News ranking, is for example, a survey of
professors and high school councilors, plus some reporting about things like
overall budget per faculty member and per student, and yes, some statistics
about the incoming class.

And... the ghost writing problem is not unheard of in the US. After all, a lot
of PhD candidates hail from India and China, so this shouldn't surprise you
overmuch.

> Government mandates have typically evolved in these countries for a reason.

I suspect it's because of government mandates in these countries and others.
For example, advanced degrees help in obtaining visa status in the US.

------
vikramkr
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.

------
chriskanan
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.

~~~
sgt101
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?

~~~
splittingTimes
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.

~~~
apathy
This is accurate in every field I’ve worked in (synthetic organic chemistry,
comp chem, statistics, genetics, clinical trials).

The top glam journals have an additional layer of politics. It’s the worst
system aside from all the others that have ever been tried...

(last time I was actually excited to review was for NEJM & was disappointed)

------
hooloovoo_zoo
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.

------
Fomite
As a faculty member who works with students in other developing countries
where this is required, this is a great step forward. The requirement not only
pushes students towards rapid publication, predatory journals but it also
produces poorer quality science because the focus becomes entirely "What do I
have to do to get just enough for that publication?"

------
analog31
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.

------
carlob
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.

------
tsjq
that's interesting. so, what's gonna be the next batches of PhD? pass a few
more exams , get that PhD degree, and add a Dr prefix ?

------
kazinator
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.

~~~
tsjq
i fail to understand why is this comment downvoted .

------
notme77
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.

~~~
sytelus
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.

~~~
schuetze
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.

