Comment by chriskanan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chriskanan | Hacker News Reader

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.

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