Friends,
This is a repost from 23 April 2007. Chris Rust and Oguzhan Ozcan had
interests comments and responses. I leave it to them to respond again
or to repost.
For the current thread, the figures would have to be enlarged,
extending beyond the EU Bologna system to include Terry's larger
frame, or -- more likely -- the full world population of doctoral
students.
This amount of publishing would flood the journal system. We could
not handle it all, no one could afford to publish it all, and no one
would have time to keep up in the literature of the field.
Competition for reader attention would become sever, and most of the
published material would go unread and uncited even to a greater
degree than the immense number of articles that are not read and
never cited today, not even cited by another author in the journal
where they are published!
Getting students to publish is not the solution. It is the problem,
unless we manage the process with care.
Ken Friedman
--
Friends,
A few weeks back, Oguzhan Ozcan wrote an interesting query to the list:
-snip-
As you know, in Europe, after 2010, Bologna Process expects
publications produced from master (second cycle) and PhD (third
cycle) dissertation just before submission of the thesis to the
examination board.
Could you please inform me,
- what is general attitude in your institute?
- How many publication do you expect in master and PhD level
- and finally what is the quality level of the publication? (do you
expect the article published in the journal indexed by Art and
Humanities Citation Index, Science Citation Index, Social Science
Citation and how many such article for both degree?)
-snip-
Oguzhan posted a second query, but no one responded. Before
responding, I sought some statistics on doctoral programs in the
Bologna nations. Despite the work of several librarians and agencies,
these are difficult to find.
This is a long, detailed answer because the question is bigger than
it seems to be. It is bigger than it seems to be because we are
speaking about all master's and doctoral students in the entire
Bologna region. This makes it a systemic problem. This is not a
curriculum problem for one school or a curriculum problem for art and
design schools. This is a curriculum problem for all schools that
offer master's degrees and doctoral degrees. Worse, it will be a
management problem for journal editors and publishers. This, in turn,
will make publishing more difficult for the students that will now be
required to publish in scholarly and scientific journals before they
can graduate.
The Bologna signatories made a policy. The idea was good. The reality
was not. Those who made this policy did not have a responsible
understanding of what those policies will mean. When the universities
in the Bologna nations require all master's and doctoral students to
publish before they graduate, this will mean a vast wave of articles
enters the journal publishing stream.
Journal and monograph publishing is a complex, interactive system.
This system is sensitive to any significant increase in the flow of
work. Before responding to Oguzhan, therefore, I wanted to get an
idea of how many students this policy will require to submit
articles. This will affect the systemic response to doctoral students
as they try to publish.
This will not be a single doctoral student or a few dozen. It will be
many tens of thousands. As nearly as I can tell, the increase in
article submissions will be at least 120,000 new articles per year,
the number of doctoral students graduating in all fields in Europe.
This will place an immense stain on the academic publishing system.
However, the academic publishing system is a global network, and
pressure on publishing outlets in worldwide. More students everywhere
are being encouraged or even (as in Europe) required.
This is taking place in more places than Europe. If we add in
doctoral students from the Americas, Asia, Australia, New Zealand,
and Africa, we can estimate conservatively that the world graduates
over 200,000 doctoral students a year in all fields and disciplines,
possibly as many as 250,000.
At the same time, more faculty members than ever before are
submitting articles, including many who have never before published.
More faculty members everywhere are also being required to publish,
or to publish more extensively than they do now. Publishing metrics
are a proxy for research productivity. Right or wrong, governments
around the world now believe that quantity of publications reflects
quality of research. They are adjusting financial support to
emphasize research publishing. Universities are responding. The total
numbers require a systemic overview.
Doctoral students and master's students are pushing articles into a
pipeline already filled with articles by senior scholars and junior
scholars. This means that Oguzhan's query of April 10 involves more
than the students.
Nevertheless, I focus on doctoral students in this post, primarily in
Europe. These alone require a long and closely reasoned post to
clarify the nature of the problem. The answer to Oguzhan's question
makes the most sense against this systemic background.
These students do not know how to write and publish research
articles. They must learn.
Added to this is the fact that we are requiring most European
students to publish at a professional level in English. This is the
language of most international journals. English is the native
language of only two nations - the United Kingdom and Ireland.
Everyone else is being asked to write a professional research article
in a second or possibly third language.
I will not discuss master's students here. Except for explaining the
difficulties of teaching skills, I am going to focus on doctoral
students. With many more master's students than doctoral students at
every university, dealing with master's students increases many times
over the number that must go from student essays to articles of
sufficient quality to warrant publication in scientific and scholarly
journals. This challenge is too large to address.
The resources of today's academic publishing system are not large
enough to meet this demand. There are too few editors. These editors
have a limited range of editorial resources and support systems.
There are not enough reviewers. Publishing firms do not offer enough
support.
Let me start by explaining what I learned about the number of
doctoral graduates across all fields. This number makes a major
difference to the issues I discuss here.
UK universities award roughly 15,000 doctorates of all kinds every
year. The five Nordic nations account for roughly 6,000 doctorates
every year, France accounts for roughly 11,000, Italy for about
4,000, and Germany for about 24,000. These nine nations account for
60,000 graduating doctors each year.
Forty-five nations take part in the Bologna process. So far, I have
not found a reliable source of aggregate statistics for the entire
group. Assembling different statistics suggests that there are
between 100,000 and 120,000 doctoral students graduating in Europe
every year.
(For comparison, US universities award 41,000 doctorates of all kinds
every year in the US. There used to be more, but the Bush
administration made it less attractive for foreign students to do
their doctoral work in the US.)
Many European schools encourage doctoral students to publish before
completing their degree. Relatively few seem to be aware that the
Bologna process mandates this as a standard after 2010. There are
significant challenges and problems in requiring the doctoral
students to publish articles before graduating. (I won't bother to
discuss the issue in relation to the far larger number of master's
degree graduates. They will face the same problems to an even greater
degree.)
I am not sure what level one can expect. The notion that doctoral
students publish in SSCI and AHCI indexed journals seems far too
ambitious. Let me explain why.
We did a quick and dirty study a few years back on the time that
associate and full professors use to take an article from first idea
to final publication. We studied professors, not doctoral students.
The answer was something like one thousand hours of work. These
people earned their PhD long ago, teaching and presumably publishing
ever since.
The problem begins here. At well-respected European schools that rank
high on research, the average faculty member publishes one article
every two or three years. This average is represents a few faculty
members who publish several articles a year and a great many who
publish once or twice in a career. That is the reality for graduated
doctors to now teach in research-based universities and professional
schools. What about research students who have not completed a PhD?
One problem we see in all schools and all fields is that no one seems
to be responsible for helping doctoral students learn to write. We
certainly do not teach them to write research at a high enough level
to publish articles scholarly or scientific journals.
Everyone says publishing is important. Many say that doctoral
students should publish one or two articles in scholarly or
scientific journals. Nearly no one takes responsibility for teaching
doctoral how to do it.
I have done workshops on how to write and publish for faculty members
and doctoral students in Scandinavia, the United Kingdom, and Brazil.
One thing I often hear is that most universities do not offer this
kind of course.
Even good workshops do not meet the need. At Middlesex University,
the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council funded the Design
Advanced Research Training workshop. This is a two-day seminar on
writing and presentation followed after a month or so by a one-day
mini-conference that allows participants to present their research
projects as papers in a conference format. The process works well.
Nevertheless, solid growth in participant skill and experience makes
us aware of the need for similar and deeper workshops and long-term
courses.
Before explaining what makes this process so challenging, I am going
to give a short account of an effective course that taught students
how to write and present research.
When I began teaching at the Norwegian School of Management in 1994,
I found a significant deficiency in writing skills among master's
students starting their thesis work. These were intelligent,
hard-working students. Their deficiency was not a lack of ability or
motivation, but the lack of training and experience.
During an integrated four-year master's program, everyone had stated
the importance of writing skills. This includes stating the
importance of developing rhetorical, analytical, and logical skills
for effective scholarly writing.
No one taught, emphasized, or required these skills in any course. No
course explicitly helped students to develop these skills.
While the curriculum included many good courses, the best courses
focused on subject matter rather than thinking skills and writing
skills.
Three research projects over a yearlong period demonstrated that the
real solution to the problem was to create a first-year course that
taught students how to do university level work.
It was a first-year course in leadership and organization theory. We
taught students to think and write. As we helped them to develop
these skills, they taught themselves organization theory and
leadership.
The reality is subtler, to be sure. Teaching students to teach
themselves involves skill, judgment, and expert coaching. It often
involves knowing when to be quiet rather than giving answerers. It
always involves resources and skills.
This kind of course is time-extensive and resource-intensive. It
demands more resources than ordinary courses.
The course was a double-credit course with twice the hours of study
and teaching time. In some years, I had one or two fellow teachers,
often an associate professor, and a doctoral research fellow. I also
had a large, skilled teaching group with one teaching assistant for
every ten students.
Developing the teaching group was a major project. It took us nearly
five years to get the group in top working shape. The teaching group
was an effective learning organization. Every year, we invited two or
three of the best students to join the teaching group. New TAs took a
year to learn the ropes, and then they helped us to train the next
group of TAs while helping the students. A fourth-year - and later a
fifth-year - student chaired the group and managed the process.
After completing the first-year course, students took a second-year
and a third-year course that followed up course skills, emphasizing
wiring, public presentation, and scholarly debate.
As students moved up through the sequence, the quality of our
master's theses increased. Part of the effect involved the spread of
skills and knowledge through the academic culture of the school.
Because of this, we began to see increasing quality in master's
thesis projects even before the first cohort completed its fourth
year. When the first cohort graduated after moving through the full
sequence, we saw a real leap in thesis quality.
The course had many interesting side effects. Other teachers sought
teaching assistants from our teaching group because they knew how to
teach and coach. We became the de facto teaching assistant training
program for the school. The course won international acclaim. I was
several times invited to lecture on it in different forums. It was
also selected as one of the most innovative undergraduate management
courses in Scandinavia, and I was asked to talk on it at the Academy
of Management in North America. It also served as the empirical basis
for an award-winning article.
Unfortunately, the course was not standardized. In the move to the
3+2 model, all undergraduate courses were standardized. This course,
with its double load, did not fit, so it vanished. So did the
follow-up courses that reinforced and developed what students used to
learn.
The results have been predictable. Many students no longer have an
opportunity to develop the skills in writing and reasoning that they
would have learned in this course. As a result, they cannot develop,
employ, or demonstrate the skills these courses allowed them to learn.
The average student has the ability and interest to master these
skills. Mastering these skills is like mastering any skill. This is
not a matter of great talent. Most students can exercise these skills
at a strong enough level for good college work. Without the
opportunity to learn and then an opportunity for practice and
coaching, they do not.
In my experience, one third of the students in the course
demonstrated a high level of skill in scholarly writing. They
mastered the basic elements of good writing and effective
referencing. These students also mastered research basics. This is
not advanced or specialized research methods, but basic research
skills such as information gathering, effective use of information,
and basic theory building.
Another third did a competent job. They had to work hard, and they
did solid work. While the results were not as good as the upper
third, they were good for first-year students. Those who continued to
work often showed significant improvement in the following years. The
last third struggled, and their work showed involved significant
problems and mistakes.
In a decade teaching the course, I saw a normal range of variation.
Since college students are selected for intelligence and aptitude,
the attention we gave to coaching meant that some courses were skewed
toward the high end. In some years, we saw a normal bell curve in
grading. In other years, the curve was skewed to the high end, with a
greater than normal distribution of top grades.
To me, this is evidence that an effective learning system is the most
robust teaching system. In creating the course, I applied what I
learned from studying W. Edwards Deming, Abraham Maslow, Mary Parker
Follett, Carl Rogers, Mary Catherine Bateson, and others. Then the
students taught themselves. I have described some key aspects of the
course in a paper titled Teaching Students to Teach Themselves
(Friedman 2004).
Now let me jump back from this to the problem of requiring doctoral
students to publish articles in scholarly and scientific journals as
a condition of graduation from European universities.
Many doctoral students have never had the opportunity to learn to
write well. In the Bologna 3+2+3 system, most students never learn to
write well. They start with 3 years of content-driven course work.
Some write a senior thesis in the third year. Unfortunately, this is
often an extended undergraduate essay or a basic exercise in stating
or repeating facts. I am seeing many senior thesis projects without
enough attention to the quality of writing, analysis, and research.
Without a strong undergraduate foundation, the master's thesis is not
likely to be much better. At least, this is what we discovered at the
Norwegian School of Management. I see the pattern repeated elsewhere
in many fields and disciplines.
There is another reason that doctoral students do not learn to write
well enough for journals.
European doctoral programs used to be longer than they are now. They
had smaller enrollments and students were more closely connected to a
supervisor. This was often the senior professor responsible for the
seminar or a research program. With examples, assigned projects, and
close metering, doctoral students learned to write. Relatively few
learned to write elegant, clear prose. Most learned to write standard
scholarly prose. This is no longer the case.
Governments implement the new Bologna process through tightly coupled
administrative systems that require completion in three years. In
many nations, universities are no longer paid for teaching and
advising doctoral students. They are paid a lump sum for every
graduated doctor who completes and nothing for those who do not. In
this context, doctoral programs can only afford make up for dramatic
deficiencies. So far, most universities do not consider the failure
to write well enough for journal publication as a deficiency. This
may now change. Unfortunately, changing this situation takes budget
resources that no one seems to be planning.
Bologna process administrators are attempting to remedy the inability
to write well with a policy that requires doctoral students to
publish articles in scientific and scholarly journals. What national
and local administrators are not doing, however, is to provide the
training and learning opportunities that PhD students need if they
are to meet this requirement.
Today, an increasing number of doctoral students are told that they
should publish. They justifiably complain that they receive no
guidance, training, or experience in writing for journal publication.
Requiring students to publish without showing them how to do it will
not help.
There are ways around this. In some fields, for example, PhD students
co-author articles with faculty members or advisors. These articles
count toward the publishing requirement. This does not work in fields
such as design where faculty members (including many doctoral
advisors) lack the foundation in research writing skills that lead to
strong publishing. It is also unsatisfactory where universities
expect students to demonstrate their own skills rather than to serve
as junior authors on papers that are in great part written by
professors.
The sensible solution to this problem would be to rethink the
requirement. This is not likely to happen. Bologna process
requirements are negotiated at the government level. Signatories
reach political agreements after long deliberation with logrolling
and compromise along the way. A policy change will not emerge until
the problems are clear to everyone. I predict it will take five to
ten years after policy implementation for that to happen. From 2010
to 2015 or 2020, doctoral students will have to live with the results
of a poorly conceived plan. So will the rest of us.
The increasing emphasis on publishing for doctoral students makes
some disadvantages of this visible in many fields.
First, and most important, few universities provide resources to help
doctoral students develop writing and publishing skills.
At the undergraduate level, I used many hours to teach basic skills
in large group meetings. Added to this, we supported every student
(or every project group of two or three students) with a tutor who
devoted up to 20 hours to each student semester project. We usually
allocated one teaching assistant for every ten students.
We limit the research writing seminar that I now teach for faculty
members and doctoral students to 10 participants. The seminar takes
30 contact hours over five months. This is probably the minimum time
that makes sense for real skills development. The best method is slow
development as each participant reads the work of all the others and
talks through the editorial process on each paper.
If Europe graduates 120,000 doctors every year, this would mean at
least 12,000 30-hour seminars plus individual tutoring. To teach
doctoral candidates how to write and publish research effectively,
European universities would have to allocate 12,000 faculty members
to cover the teaching load of 360,000 contact hours.
This is not likely to happen.
Developing these resources at the master's level is even less likely.
There is more.
If European universities were to make this investment, most would
need significant teacher training for the faculty members assigned to
teach these courses. Teaching high level writing and publishing
skills is a special art. It requires editorial knowledge and
experience. It requires specific teaching and tutoring skills. These
skills are uncommon.
This means that European universities would need to make a
significant investment in teaching many of the 12,000 faculty members
who would then teach seminars for the 120,000 doctoral students who
graduate every year.
Not likely.
The current demand for increased publishing is already creating
several problems.
1) We are seeing an explosion of fake publishing firms and
quasi-fraudulent conferences that exist so that people can create the
publishing statistics they need for graduation and publishing metrics.
2) We are seeing an explosion of journals with insufficient editorial
and publishing routines. The result is a significant number of
journals marked by poor editing. These journals publish acceptable
scholarship, but the writing is often poor. Much of this material is
not read or cited. It exists because someone needs to publish it.
3) We are seeing many conferences and lesser journals marred by poor
refereeing. These publish or present questionable scholarship filled
with serious factual errors and mistakes as well as poor writing.
The situation is not bad for everyone, though. It is creating new
industries and services. Some of these industries have existed for
some time. The increased emphasis on publishing by doctoral students
is making them into growth sectors.
4) We are seeing a large new industry for editors and writing
coaches. Norway has several. When I earned my PhD, many universities
maintained lists of approved editorial typists who mastered scholarly
style sheets and academic formatting rules. They provided editing
services. They ensured that references were in order. They
occasionally gave grammar and writing advice. (We also had a
tradition of excellent advisors, at least at my university.)
The new editorial industry goes beyond the editorial services these
typists used to perform for PhD thesis projects.
While university presses and book publishers provide professional
editorial support to their authors, journals do not. Authors pay for
the editorial support they need. Many faculty authors use editorial
services. So do their doctoral students.
Googling "academic writing and editing" turns up over 1,560,000 hits.
5) Some universities maintain extensive web sites on writing skills
for research students. While many are aimed at undergraduates,
graduate students and even faculty members use the advice they give.
6) Some universities also offer extensive training and coaching in
research writing.
The first three problems I mentioned exist now. The explosion of
journal and conference submissions is leading to new problems. The
new policy that requires doctoral candidates to publish a journal
article before graduation will make these problems worse.
7) Even without master's students attempting to publish journal
articles, the Bologna policy will add at least 120,000 new articles
to the annual journal submission load. If some universities demand
that doctoral students publish more than one article, the load will
be even heavier.
This number does not include similar requirements at universities in
the Americas, Asia, Australia-New Zealand, or Africa. The worldwide
load will be impossible to manage.
8) The pressure of this load on journal editors and reviewers will
probably lead to several responses.
Editors will need to be far stricter in sending articles to
reviewers. If they do not reject more articles before the review
process, overloaded reviewers will begin to decline reviewing
requests.
I am probably a good example. I do a significant amount of reviewing
for journals and conferences. I take several hours for most
conference reviews.
I am now overloaded with review requests. This year, I made the
mistake of agreeing to review for several conferences on the
assumption that most would send me two or three papers. The load has
been far heavier. It takes several hours to read and review a paper.
Even reading and reviewing an abstract takes time. A proper journal
review takes six hours, a full working day.
I am increasingly careful in agreeing to review. I am also stricter
in my rejection policy. I give as much time and attention as possible
to good articles and papers, including excellent articles or papers
where I can add value by making suggestions. To make that time
available, I may return a flawed article or paper with the note that
obvious flaws mean that it should have been an editor's desk
rejection.
Editors and conference organizers who do not respect reviewer time
will soon find themselves without willing reviewers.
It will be necessary for editors to use desk rejection more often.
Attention to format requirements, referencing standards, and basic
writing quality will become a first-level screening mechanism.
Nevertheless, this will discriminate against less experienced
writers, making it more important that universities offer support for
those who must learn how to publish. It will also discriminate
against those who write in English as a second language.
9) Many fields have another problem with reviewers. An increasing
numbers of reviewers do not file their reviews.
Responsible editors and conference organizers find that irresponsible
reviewers increase their workload when they do not file reviews or
file only summary comments.
This forces them to request more work from the reviewers who do file
their reviews.
The increasing load of conference and journal submissions will
intensify this problem as well. Once again, the answer will be
editors who treat every submission with a preliminary editor's
review, saving reviewers for content issues and research methods.
Nearly half the articles I review suffer from basic format and
writing flaws. As editors weed these out, my workload will once again
become manageable. The difficulties will go back to doctoral students
- or graduated doctors - whose programs did not give them the
necessary basic skills to manage format and writing in their article
submissions.
There are other problems, but at nearly 4,900 words, this article is
already too long.
I do not want to sound pessimistic. I do say that universities and
faculty members must give real attention to this new requirement.
If doctoral students are to meet the new Bologna standard that
Oguzhan warns us about, we must teach them how to write and publish
to journal standards.
In design and art, this means several challenges. I will come back
later in the week to discuss some of these.
For now, I will get to the end of my note by answering Oguzhan's question.
If - and only if - a school provides the training that doctoral
students need in learning how to write research articles good enough
for journal publication, THEN a school can set standards at a high
level. We can only set standards as high as the level of the training
we provide.
If our faculty members publish often in journals indexed by the Art
and Humanities Citation Index, the Science Citation Index, of the
Social Science Citation Index, asking our students to publish in
these kinds of journals is reasonable. If we do not, it means that we
cannot teach doctoral students how to do it.
If we do AND we teach the skills we have mastered, then we can
require your doctoral students to publish in journals indexed by
AHCI, SCI, and SSCI. The same holds true of any other standard or
index.
If our faculty members average one or two articles per year, with
most publishing something serious every year, then we can expect your
doctoral students to publish one or two articles as a condition of
graduation. One article might be co-authored with a faculty member or
another author. One might be a single-author article.
If, on the other hand, 10% of our faculty members publish frequently
while the rest only publish once or twice in a career, our culture
does not support serious independent publishing. In that case, we
cannot expect our doctoral students to publish single-author articles
in leading journals. If a faculty culture does not support strong
publishing, the faculty should accept any reasonable journal article
for the requirement, whether or not it is indexed, and without regard
to how many authors it has.
We cannot expect doctoral students to do what we cannot do, and we
cannot expect them master skills that our program do not teach.
I hope this is not too much more of an answer than you wanted. I
wanted to outline the very serious issues involved in this new
requirement. We must understand what this means to our programs, to
our students, and to us, to find deal with a requirement that is
likely to do as much harm as good.
A school that treats this new requirement without the solid
commitment and preparation that student publishing requires will find
that this new system generates difficulties for the students. It will
finally damage the school.
Schools that take the requirement seriously can use it to make
serious advances and improvements. This will happen if they give
students the skills, training, and support they need to meet the new
requirement. If and only if.
Sincerely,
Ken
Reference
Friedman, Ken. 2004. Teaching Students to Teach Themselves. Norwegian
School of Management - BI. Pedagogical Development Seminar. June 1,
2004. Oslo: The Norwegian School of Management.
--
Ken Friedman
Professor
Dean, Swinburne Design
Swinburne University of Technology
Melbourne, Australia
+61 3 92.14.68.69 Tlf Swinburne
+61 404 830 462 Mobile
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