Recently, some universities in some regions of the world are making an effort to use a list of published international journal articles with related research interests on the same research topic as a substitute for a doctoral dissertation (e.g., DBA, EMBA, EdD)? 1. If this is a trend, what would be the implications for the quality of the Ph.D. degree? Are there major implications for higher education? 2. If not, what are the general skills involved in writing a dissertation that differ from those involved in writing international journal articles, or vice versa? 3. What pedagogical skills should the supervisor of a dissertation or journal article have? Are there any similarities or differences? 4. Should doctoral students write a dissertation or write a stack of journal articles to replace the doctoral dissertation? What are the considerations/values behind this? Please brainstorm or share your own ideas with your fellow students / colleagues. By Percy Kwok
Agree. But some universities want big volume of academic publications of high citation index among academics and their research students, which would be counted for their world ranking.
Hello, again, Percy Lai Yin Kwok
I have noticed some universities recognise work in the form of journal articles as a substitute for a thesis and grant a doctoral title to candidate on that basis. To answer your questions, (1) I do not believe this to be detrimental as the quality I have observed from PhD theses and published papers are similar. There are not any implications of this on higher education as both seem to me to require similar skills. That should answer (2) as well. Similarly, supervisors would require the same pedagogical skills - and hopefully not have any extra or different requirements (3) as the candidate hopefully has sufficient self-motivation. To answer (4), I think both require the same amount of time and effort from the candidate so I am not biased to one type or the other.
This is not new. However it is sometimes the harder road to travel, depending on the field of scholarship. I have worked with one student an MD, and PhD Candidate Public Health Epidemiology.
It was not easy compared to his peers, but having entered the PhD program with two articles published, he had the maturity and drive and fore planning of a series of scholarly rigourous publicactions.
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