Friends,
Anna Rubbo wrote that universities are going mad with the pressure to
publish. The notion of requiring an MA student to publish three
articles in ISI Web of Science journals to advance to PhD candidacy
is whacky. No decent university would demand such a requirement, and
no decent university does. This is an utterly degraded metric
requirement set forth by an administrative bureaucrat with no
understanding of publishing realities. If this is a national
standard, it suggests a nation so far behind the curve in research
production that they really do not know the difference between
metrics and the genuine research contribution that a journal article
is intended to represent.
There is also a second problem here. The student (or the bureaucrats
at that student's university) must not know what the ISI index is.
ISI Web of Science comprises the three major citations indices,
Science Citation Index. Social Science Citation Index, and Arts and
Humanities Citation Index. The three ISI indices are selective and
limited to well known, high impact journals. These indices include no
internal journals.
Someone is robbing this student of the right to an education. At some
schools, deans and department heads are becoming so concerned about
this trend that they explicitly tell research students NOT to
publish, but rather to focus on learning and mastering skills. I
might not go that far, but the idea of requiring a student to publish
in an ISI journal before completing the PhD is indecent. It demands a
level of expertise and experience that one normally does not attain
until several years into an active career, at least not unless one
co-authors with a senior scholar, as many natural science students do
for their first citations.
Thank you for posting this, Anna. This tells the terrible story far
better than an abstract debate can do.
Yours,
Ken
--
Anna Rubbo wrote:
--snip--
A couple of days ago I received a follow up email from a student who had
submitted a paper to ATR wanting to know about the status of the submission.
I hope I don't offend by quoting from the email,
"As you may know, in our country, the M.A. students in order to continuing
their educating in PhD stage need three or more scientific papers printed in
ISI journals. My two ISI articles have been printed in internal journals up
to now and I need at least the acceptance of another paper as soon as
possible. Please let me know is it possible for you to give me a preliminary
acceptance of my paper? it will be so valuable for me"
In my view this is universities going mad. I am not criticising the writer
of the email, just amazed. Are there many students under such pressures?
I'm all for students publishing, all for universities encouraging it-
mandating it is another story.
--
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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