No paper, no PhD? India rethinks graduate student policy | Hacker News Reader

No paper, no PhD? India rethinks graduate student policy

nature.com

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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.

> 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...). 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?

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

You could find UNC Chapel Hill's School of Public Health, one of the best in the country. They require a paper to be submitted.

Or UC Berkeley's math department, which doesn't require submitting anything for publication at all.

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.

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

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.

I disagree. I work in other settings where this requirement exists, and a focus on just what is needed to get a publication in a predatory journal is the source of a lot of the shoddy science.

Many of my colleagues in grad school got their PhDs without first-author publications. It was not at all uncommon for a thesis to essentially be three or four papers stapled together, which would be submitted to journals shortly before or after the defense. Publication didn’t usually happen until several months later.

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

Publications are not a universal Ph.D. requirement at US universities.

Usually the main Ph.D. requirements are: course of study, qualifying process (e.g. exams and/or dissertation proposal/approval), written dissertation, oral defense, and possible residency (i.e. tuition) and teaching requirements.

MIT doesn't mandate publications: https://oge.mit.edu/gpp/degrees/doctoral/

Neither does Stanford: https://gap.stanford.edu/handbooks/gap-handbook/chapter-4/su...

Neither does Yale: http://catalog.yale.edu/gsas/policies-regulations/#degreereq...

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.

You are so lucky! I've had math papers rejected after a year!

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.

CS conferences are nice though. Only 6-8 weeks!

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.

Because the incentives aren't aligned. If the requirement is "One paper", then why would you try to publish in a reputable journal, go through peer review, need to revise and resubmit, etc. when you can just pay your money and check the needed box.

Because that's what you need to do for a career in research and teaching.

-- the optimist, probably

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.

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).

I've seen some "official" IEEE conferences that really look like junk conferences/spamferences.

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.

As usual then it seems they are trying to solve the wrong problem. By "as usual" I mean it's like a lot of problems in society, we try to fix the symptoms instead of the illness.

So pretty much where the US is headed then?

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

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

That should tell you how grad students are paid.

As a counter-anecdote, I've met a bunch of highly paid software engineers in the Bay area with no degree.

Isn't the demand due to an overabundance of highly qualified applicants in the job market? Employers see no harm in asking for preposterous qualifications, and there are enough desperate people looking for jobs.

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.

> 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.

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.

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)

Question is if you can trust a three letter word in a resume to _any_ degree at all, or do we always need to devolve to going back to reading the entire thesis to get an opinion of whether the person did good work.

Not to mention, at the low rungs of Indian phds you would not even know if the thesis was just plain plagarized work from somewhere else. That is actually super common, even in publications.

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.

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?"

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.

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.

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 ?

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.

i fail to understand why is this comment downvoted .

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.

You can simply do a course-based masters for that... same classes as a PhD student, no need to produce original research.

There exists a handful of EngD problems out there. It’s to be treated as an applied PhD where the goal is to develop as a leader of industrial R&D.

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.

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