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Gondolinian

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I have heard that in economics and possibly other social sciences Ph.D. students can staple together three journal articles, call it a dissertation and get awarded their doctorate. But I've recently read "Publication, Publication" by Gary King, which I interpret as saying a very bright and hardworking undergraduate can write a quantitative political science article in the space of a semester, while carrying a normal class load.

This is confusing. Now, Dr. King teaches at Harvard so all his students are smart and it's two students writing one paper but this still seems insane. I'm guessing a full course load is around 6 classes a term and people are to write a journal article or close approximation thereof in a semester when three of them will suffice to get a Ph.D. and many people fail out of said degree who are very, very smart.

Where am I confused? Is research not that hard, a stapler thesis a myth or these class projects not strictly comparable to real papers?

http://gking.harvard.edu/classes/advanced-quantitative-political-methodology-government-2001-government-1002-and-e-2001

Abstract: I show herein how to write a publishable paper by beginning with the replication of a published article. This strategy seems to work well for class projects in producing papers that ultimately get published, helping to professionalize students into the discipline, and teaching them the scientific norms of the free exchange of academic information. I begin by briefly revisiting the prominent debate on replication our discipline had a decade ago and some of the progress made in data sharing since.

Citation: King, Gary. 2006. Publication, Publication, PS: Political Science and Politics 39: 119–125. Copy at http://j.mp/iTXtrg

From an economics perspective, the stapler dissertation is real. The majority of the time, the three papers haven't been published.

It's also possible to publish empirical work produced in a few months. The issue is where that article is likely to be published. There's a clear hierarchy of journals, and a low ranked publication could hurt more than it helps. Dissertation committees have very different standards depending on the student's ambition to go into academia. If the committee has to write letters of rec to other professors, it takes a lot more work... (read more)

6[anonymous]11y

There is usually more to a "PhD by publication" than just publishing any 3 articles and then submitting them for the degree. A nice 2011 article in Times Higher Education describes what the process actually requires, at least in the UK most importantly, coherence: the articles must be on related themes, and additional supporting documentation on the order of 10k words is usually required to convert the independent publications into some kind of coherent package that, very often resembles a conventional thesis. It's also informative to look over the recent discussion on the Thesis Whisperer blog - lots of comments from people in various disciplines about the realities of publication-based theses.... and usually they describe them as more work than a conventional thesis. For published papers like the one described by Gary King - it may be hard to write a combination of them that meets an institution's criterion for PhD by publication. Not just the coherence part but usually there is a requirement that a PhD makes a novel contribution to the field -- and it is hard to justify this with strictly replication-based approaches. However, if the work follows King's suggestion to replicate and then make minimal changes ("make one improvement, or the smallest number of improvements possible to produce new results, and show the results so that we can attribute specific changes in substantive conclusions to particular methodological changes" - King p.120) - a series of such publications on closely related themes starts to look a lot like a conventional PhD..... although getting a paper through peer review is still quite a challenge. King's paper (and supplemental comments) can also be a useful guide for researchers outside academia to get published.

16JoshuaZ11y

I don't know about social sciences, but the situation in math isn't that far off. The short answer is that the papers done by the undergraduates are real papers but the level of papers which are of the type and quality that would be stapleable into a thesis are different (higher quality, more important results) than would be the sort done in undergraduate research.