Ban Doctorates 'By the Pound'

Alongside triviality, unoriginality and, nowadays, dishonesty, one attribute for which journal editors are particularly vigilant in papers is obesity. Some research reports are, of course, necessarily bulky documents. This is especially true in fields such as high energy physics, where a collaboration of several dozen physicists and machine staff may be necessary to describe the design, outcome and analysis of experiments that take many months. At the other end of the scale, few if any worthwhile contributions to the literature today can be as effectively succinct as the Nature letter in which Francis Crick and Jim Watson first revealed to the world their discovery of the DNA double helix and its biological implications. Yet unduly detailed or prolix accounts of work that is otherwise acceptable and publishable continue to arrive through editorial letterboxes, provoking both editors and referees to demand appropriate surgery. Neither they nor readers and purchasers want gratuitous verbosity. It’s all the more weird, therefore, that scientists persist in conniving at the production of one type of document that they know full well is invariably way over a sensible or even readable length. Doctoral theses, prefaced by immense literature surveys, weighed down by descriptions of methods that can be found in the relevant handbooks, and recording the minutiae of at least three years’ effort (plus self-indulgent, undisciplined discussion) can still be found accumulationg-unconsuled-on university library shelves. One person who has been fighting a surprisingly lonely battle against this sort of thing for nearly two decades is Beverly Halstead, reader in the departments of geology and zoology at the University of Reading in England. His latest plea for sanity, which appeared recently in Nature (vol. 331, February 11, 1988, p. 497), incorporates an extraordinary experience. One of Halstead’s research students, having already gained an M.Sc., had produced a doctoral thesis consisting of five papers that had already appeared in the leading international journal in the field, together with a “synthesis” pulling the work together. The result? The external examiners’ report stated that the candidate had demonstrated “an admirable knowledge” of the paleontology of the vertebrate group he had studied for six years, and of published work in the field. But the thesis was between a quarter and a third of the desired thickness. The examiners denied the candidate a Ph.D. Instead, the hapless researcher was awarded another master’s degree. It’s all very perplexing, and one can well understand Halstead’s tetchy incredulity over his external examiners’ approach, which he likens to an art critic judging a painting simply on the amount of physical area of canvas covered by pigment. But aren’t his experience and his complaint really part of a wider, continuing, unresolved question—that of the purpose of doctoral work? Whatever the formal wording may say, it is clear that doctoral research and its assessment are treated very differently in different centers. Is the aim simply to train candidates in research methods, and to assess their understanding of those methods and the material or phenomena they have studied? Or must the postgraduate student actually solve a given problem or at least make significant advances in scientific understanding? Is publishability of doctoral work an essential test? Should papers be submitted or published before the degree is awarded? And—to return to Halstead's problem—why should such tested, peer-reviewed work not form the major part of a thesis? The distinguished British ecologist Kenneth Mellanby (Nature, vol. 317, 1985, p. 606) has recorded that his own doctoral thesis consisted simply of a reprint of a 14-page paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. Much more recently, Halstead has been told that his pleas have led to at least one research student in Japan’s being allowed to submit three published papers, rather than consume time and paper in producing a thesis. That’s very sensible. Refusing a doctorate to a competent candidate with an impressive clutch of papers to his or her credit is as absurd as giving the degree to another student brandishing a fat one whose contents are both unpublished and unpublishable.. Dixon, known for his concise musings on science and scientists, is European editor of THE SCIENTIST.

Ban Doctorates 'By the Pound'

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