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Comment by markus92 | Hacker News Reader

When I started my PhD, they were clear: four publications is a degree. That's the goal. Understanding is a bonus but doesn't get the title!

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4 first author pubs? Maybe this is field dependent but that sounds like a pretty extreme requirement. The most I've seen formally required in my field is 1 first author peer reviewed pub, but many programs don't even set that as an official requirement anymore.

EE & CS aim for that many. I've heard maths grads aim for 1.

Makes sense, it'd still be kinda harsh as a strict graduation requirement for EECS though wouldn't it?

In biology I've seen a lot of more recent theses where a couple of the chapters are from middle author works with a bit of extra context on what the student did, and only 1 first author chapter. But besides being slower to do generally, bio still has a lot of people that don't believe in shared first authorship. Sometimes what is technically a second author chapter was pretty close to 50/50 in what the student actually contributed.

Four first author publications, yes. University guidelines say three, but in practice they'd like to see four or five to get it approved.

Yeah, it wildly depends on the maturity of the field it seems

That's sad. That makes your piece of paper worth even less, in my opinion. How is that different from a degree mill. By the way I have my piece of paper but what I value (and what my colleagues value) is my understanding

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