> 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”.<p>Yes! A well-written thesis continues to be a very valuable contribution to the literature, but it is the parts that are <i>not</i> original work that are most useful. The reason is that older researchers in a field have almost no incentives to write good and <i>truly</i> introductory review papers, and the introductory sections of a thesis are often the best point of entry.<p>However, most theses are not well written because student don't have much incentive either.<p>> Hence, theses become bloated with “page after page of methods”, along the lines of: “I pipetted 2.5ml of this enzyme into that tube.”<p>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.<p>> "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.”<p>Ahh yes, just what we need. Thesis-by-tweet...
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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
This infuriates me:<p>"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”."<p>Translation: never do work on anything that has even the <i>possibility</i> of failure.<p>Yeah, what a great way to advance knowledge.<p>This is just another extension of "negative results have no value in science".
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.
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_.<p>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...<p>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!).<p>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!<p>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.<p>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...<p>Just wait 5 years and see why that's a mistake.
This is only a critique of the monograph-type PhD thesis, which I agree that should become obsolete.<p>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.<p>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.
Reasons for thesis taking too long (and approximate time dealing with them):<p>- Writer's block: couple of weeks<p>- 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<p>- Dealing with all the citations (because whatever you write, barring the most obvious, has to be quoted): one-two months<p>- Nitpicking by advisor: some weeks
<a href="http://www.nature.com/physics/looking-back/crick/index.html#f1" rel="nofollow">http://www.nature.com/physics/looking-back/crick/index.html#...</a><p>Crick et al wrote a 1-page paper (on the structure of DNA) for which they won a Nobel Prize back in 1953.