While this is described as maybe the most controversial of several reforms to India’s doctoral programs, only one person is quoted speaking against it.
Dr Mukherjee said that this was the wrong approach. “If we want good quality research, and are worried about the rise of predatory journals that cash in on the students’ need to publish, the concern is the predatory journals,” she said.
Most of the article is about what students have to do to enter doctoral programs, not about what you need to do to complete it.
The news story is a good kick in the pants to me to finish this post, which I have been thinking about and drafting for months. Because India is far from the only place that has been requiring its doctoral students to publish papers to get their degrees.
A while ago, I asked about what graduate programs required their students to publish before they were eligible to graduate. I was surprised that the practice was quite widespread, and by the number of publications some institutions require their students to put out to graduate.
The highest requirement reported was three first-author published papers with two more submitted (five total). Another reported authorship on four papers, of which two have to be first author. But even requiring a paper or two was much more widespread than I expected.
This replies to my Twitter thread were abundant and helpful, so you might want to look through them.
A little later, DrugMonkey ran a poll that indicated a little more than half of programs required a publication to graduate.
To be blunt, I think requiring publications before a degree is awarded is bad, and I think India made the right move.
Publication requirements are extremely unfriendly to students. Neither a student nor supervisor nor university has any control over the peer review and editorial process. So it is entirely possible for a student’s graduation to be delayed through no fault of the student. And there is a real financial cost in many cases for students have to pay tuition and expenses for extra semesters, when all the work is done.
Worse, there is a completely predictable outcome of publication requirements. A publication requirement creates an incentive for fast publication and high acceptance, both of which are most easily achieved by shoddy work and editorial shortcuts.
Researchers found 88% of “approved” journals were problematic. India Express reported did other investigations that suggested India was a major source of articles for dubious publishers. More than one person has suggested that such requirements are partly responsible for the enormous growth of MDPI and similar publishers.
I am annoyed hearing researchers loudly tell others not to publish in MDPI or Frontiers or what have you, and then get upset that these publishers are growing all the time. But they don’t seem to look at things like graduate publication requirements that create a vast, worldwide market for the services of journal articles where decisions are fast and acceptance is likely.
I completely understand the counter arguments. Training a student to produce professional level academic work is the point of a doctorate. The best way to prove that work is publishable is to publish it. It is harder to argue, “That shouldn’t have been published” than “That won’t be published.”
I also get that public institutions are always being asked to justify their expenses to prove they are not wasting taxpayer money. Journal articles are a “product” that is easily tracked and counted.I am all in favour of getting graduate students to publish. This should absolutely be the goal and students should be encouraged – or even pushed (with kindness) – to write up work and get it in the hands of editors.
But Goodhart’s law comes in action once again. When something becomes used as a measure, it stops being a good measure.
Reference
Patwardhan B, Nagarkar S, Gadre SR, Lakhotia SC, Katoch VM, Moher D. 2018. A critical analysis of the ‘UGC-approved list of journals’. Current Science 114(6): 1299-1303. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26797335
External links
India axes publication goal for PhDs to tackle predatory journals (Registration required)
Not mandatory to publish in journals before final PhD thesis: UGC
Depends on the discipline, but requiring papers to be submitted for publication is a good idea. Then the manuscripts can be combined as chapters of a thesis, add a general introduction and conclusion for the thesis itself, and the peer review can continue after getting the PhD degree. For book disciplines, one would just write a thesis. Some of my thesis papers were published 1-2 years after getting my PhD. All work I did in graduate school made it out 4 years after getting my PhD.
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