Is the doctoral thesis obsolete? | Hacker News Reader

Is the doctoral thesis obsolete?

timeshighereducation.co.uk

67 pointslfpa250 comments

> 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”.

Yes! A well-written thesis continues to be a very valuable contribution to the literature, but it is the parts that are not original work that are most useful. The reason is that older researchers in a field have almost no incentives to write good and truly introductory review papers, and the introductory sections of a thesis are often the best point of entry.

However, most theses are not well written because student don't have much incentive either.

> Hence, theses become bloated with “page after page of methods”, along the lines of: “I pipetted 2.5ml of this enzyme into that tube.”

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.

> "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.”

Ahh yes, just what we need. Thesis-by-tweet...

Maybe someone should do a PhD to discover if the Tweesis is the future.

>Ahh yes, just what we need. Thesis-by-tweet...

Look, a lot of things don't need 100 pages of text. Of course, as a researcher, what you don't want to do is to make your research easy to read, because people may then assume that it was easy to do and therefore not impressive.

The conundrum during all research talks.

No, just add complicated-looking figures and you're fine.

If you're simple, clear and first, you're going to get plenty of citations, though.

For CS? Not in your thesis, but maybe in a paper based on the thesis.

In natural sciences, thesis is based on papers. In CS, paper is based on thesis.

Both actually. Its just that your thesis won't get many if any non-self citations, even if it is really good. People will cite your paper, which they bother to take time reading (hopefully).

> As a researcher, what you don't want to do is to make your research easy to read

Mmmh.. Disagree. This is the same idea as those software that nobody wants to explain you what does exactly, and therefore don't get a lot of customers using it after the novelty wears off. This is a red flag for mediocrity for me. Of course you should aim to get so many readers as possible.

http://tinytocs.org/

Good comment. My addendum to follow is not directed to you, but to non-scientific readership.

There's both absolute and relative poor documentation. The brevity of most scientific publishing (coupled with the lack of any sort of external incentive for clarity, as you point out) means that even papers that are good, by the standard of scientific papers, can be a real bear to turn into working examples. I personally feel that a lot of what makes various labs good is knowledge of the things that aren't going into the papers. A dissertation, with (potentially) a lot more room to go into details, can serve both as a source of this information for external readers, as well as a convenient internal reference for people in the lab who need to dig up some details of their prehistory.

edit: to clarify, my perspective on this is coming from physics. In other fields, there's more of an emphasis on explicit protocols and "methods sections" that presumably help with this sort of thing.

Yes, if anything we need better documentation of methods. This is something often overlooked with the open-scientific-data movement also: data on its own is not very useful (in the sense of being insufficient to draw valid conclusions) if you don't have good documentation of how precisely it was collected, which is critical to interpreting it correctly... otherwise you just have some numbers in a CSV file. Traditionally PhD theses are one of the few places that really exhaustively documents what exactly they did and how, while papers tend to gloss over a lot of things. There's been a little noise about that [1], but not a lot of movement so far.

I do think a movement of theses away from monograph-style to collection-of-articles style is okay, though.

[1] http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2014/11/18/nevermind-the-...

There is no need these days for brevity with methods since everything is online. Put it all into the SI and be done with it.

One problem with many methods is the lack of description of the pitfalls and critical steps. When you go to repeat an experiment you often don't have exactly the same equipment or reagents as the original paper. Most of the time this does not matter, but in an annoying number of cases some particular step needs to be performed using a precise piece of equipment or brand of reagent. It is only when you can't get the experiment to work and you contact the person on the bench who did the research that you learn "yeh we tried all the other reagents and only brand x works". If there is something critical put it in the method that it is critical!

In my experience a lot of very critical steps in experiments are frequently never formally defined in literature or even within lab notebooks, existing only as institutional knowledge. What may seem like an obvious step not worth docimenting to the original investigators is non-obvious to people looking to repeat the work, leading to different results.

My thesis was very much a recipe for how to make my experiment work. We frequently used the dissertations from former students as reference manuals for their methods. I cranked mine out in 3 months.

Amusing anecdote: This was 20+ years ago, when technical word processing was still a work in progress. Many of my peers struggled endlessly with formatting. My plan was to create a mechanically rough manuscript, get through the defense, then worry about formatting afterwards. It worked, with a hitch: I never got page numbering to work, and ended up pasting the page numbers in by hand. Also, many of the figures are obviously pencil drawings that were photocopied.

Agreed! Not every thesis is great, but most research isn't great either. Good students write good theses and I've found many with whole chapters on important topics that are just glossed over in the research papers.

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.

My thesis (in math / CS) was essentially several papers stapled together, except that I made the papers into chapters, expanded/rewrote bits and pieces, and added narrative to glue the chapters together.

This took about six months. In retrospect, I think this time was well spent. I developed my understanding of the material quite substantially by reworking it. But doing so was certainly not nearly as fun as writing new papers.

Same here except that for me it feels like wasting a lot of time, unlearning all my other skills and not staying up to date with current trends.

Having to rewrite polished and reviewed papers is aweful and not publishing stuff (except in a thesis) is unacceptable for many institutions, so I think making papers to chapters is the way to go as long as there isn't something completely different (e.g. no prose but making all data, hardware, software, documentation etc open source)

Depends very much on the field. Everyone I knew in experimental physics was focused on a single experiment or type of apparatus, generally an attempt to measure a single number (or rather, because it was all "physics beyond the standard model", an attempt to set a new limit on a single number.)

Yep, my math PhD was literally 4 submitted papers placed together with an introduction section to the topic area. This wasn't 100% common in my department (US public state university), but my advisor strongly suggested it as the most efficient way to go.

What constitutes a staple-thesis varies a bit though. My advisor required 3 top-tier papers in a well-defined topic. Papers in other topics or workshop papers does not count.

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.

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.

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 is so true. A UK PhD is a gloried three year honours degree. Here in Australia traditionally PhDs averaged over 4 years (I took nearly 5 years, but I was working full time for the last 18 months after my scholarship ran out). I knew only one person who finished in the regulation time of three years - most people got most of their results in the last year.

When I was an academic my university put great pressure on us to get our students out in under 3 years citing the UK system. Of course when we raised the problems the UK system (ie having our students graduate with no papers) would have on them we were told basically to shut up and do what ever it took to get the students out on time. It became pretty common for supervisors to write their students dissertation and for more senior researchers to 'gift' results to students to get them out on time.

It became pretty common for supervisors to write their students dissertation

Wow! Academic dishonesty just to push people through the system? So much for abusing students as cheap labor!

Yep. Just one of the many reasons I am no longer an academic. I should mention that students are still being abused as cheap labor - the only change is the incompetent are getting pushed through.

This was not my experience. My UK Computer Science peer group was expected to publish their thesis work in a good journal, with some conference papers along the way. The thesis was the definitive long-form version, but a key question at the defence was "so where was this work published?". "It wasn't" would not have been a good answer.

Expectations may vary by school.

They vary by area because of the nature of research.

It is much harder in the experimental sciences to "schedule" results. My PhD has both experimental (lab work) and computing aspects and all the computing research took within the expect time (+- 20%). The lab aspects were much more variable. I had one experiment which I expected would take 3 months to finalise that worked first time and I was finished by the afternoon (this doesn't happen that often unfortunately), while other experiments I thought would take a week ended up taking 6 months.

Yes, my experience was in the biological sciences, where bench work can have a very long amount of time between iterations. I'm always amazed that anyone working with mammals (eg evaluating transgenic mice) ever finishes their work.

The issue is really the hard cut off that was mentioned above. Had I stayed on longer at that lab, I may have been able to get my results published, but there are many incentives to move on.

This is true. The problem is that when you go looking for a post doc if you don't have any publications then you are thought to be incompetent.

If you were hiring a post doc for a two-year position, would you choose the person who had managed to convert research into a published paper in 3-4 years, or the other guy?

This infuriates me:

"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”."

Translation: never do work on anything that has even the possibility of failure.

Yeah, what a great way to advance knowledge.

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.

I think there is always low hanging fruit, you just have to know where to find it. Agreed that publishing papers, especially in top conferences, takes more of a team effort now.

I hope we don't train our young scientists to go after low hanging fruit _exclusively_.

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_.

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...

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!).

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!

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.

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...

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.

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.

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):

- Writer's block: couple of weeks

- 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

- Dealing with all the citations (because whatever you write, barring the most obvious, has to be quoted): one-two months

- Nitpicking by advisor: some weeks

In this process. Can confirm.

>Nitpicking by advisor: some weeks

Lucky you. I was told to completely redo mine by my advisor.

If you are going and writing the whole thing before showing it to the advisor, it doesn't sound like you were being supervised very well - in physics it seems more common to work on a cycle of writing, showing, rewriting, etc.

My masters thesis content was known long before submission, and had been read at multiple stages by my supervisor before I have him a full "draft".issues that require a full rewrite should be aired at a much earlier stage.

Lucky you. My advisor has a reputation of not even reading theses (http://www.thespectroscope.com/read/dont-stress-over-your-th...) which makes it hard to gauge what the thesis should even be.

In the experimental sciences there is also the minor problem of getting the experiments to work. Until you have the data you can't write anything.

Ah, you never had to deal with:

- Running and rerunning raw experiment (3 months)

- Running and rerunning statistical analyses (2 months)

Sure this is an issue, but I was focusing more on the 'writing' aspects of the thesis, not getting the data (which, you are right, is a big problem as well)

http://www.nature.com/physics/looking-back/crick/index.html#...

Crick et al wrote a 1-page paper (on the structure of DNA) for which they won a Nobel Prize back in 1953.

Adding Rosalind Franklin to the author list would have made it too long.

yeah..observational discoveries are mostly luck, versus the hard, technical skill required to derive something like an equation.

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