Abstract for seminar I
Aleksandra Denisova
In chapter 7.1 it was mentioned that doctoral student can choose and shape their research topics to some extent. This independence is of course necessary, especially for the experienced students such as 3rd or 4th year of PhD studies. At the same time, inexperienced PhD students need more leadership from supervisor, in some cases it is needed to give at least some starting points. Unfortunately, some supervisors expect more independence from their students which is impossible at the very beginning of their research. I think that a PhD student should become an independent researcher during the studies, but it is strange to expect independency from the yesterday’s master student. On the other hand, other type of supervisors prefer to control everything even if PhD student is experienced enough to choose his or her own project. This is also very undesirable behavior, since in this case PhD student becomes just a kind of realizer, who works only with someone else’s ideas. This is unacceptable; PhD students at the end of their studies should be able to work independently as much as possible in order to continue their scientific carrier afterwards.
Among other responsibilities I would like to accentuate the problem of the criticism from supervisor. It was said, that supervisor should be careful and do not hurt PhD student’s feelings. This is completely true, but in my opinion, opposite problem also exists: supervisor tries to avoid strong criticism and student’s distress as a consequence. In this case supervisor prefers not to criticize student at all or do not express his or her opinion fully. This situation seems to be very dangerous, as far as student will not learn anything about his mistakes and disadvantages of his work and continue working the same wrong way.
Another thing which I would like to point at is friendly relationship between student and supervisor. In my view, although relationship in this case can be quite warm there should be always some distance, some line which should not be crossed both by PhD student and supervisor. Otherwise, absence of it can lead to undue familiarity and disrespect to the supervisor. This of course also can lead to the difficulties in work and supervising.
In the text it is said that in the thesis contributions by everyone should be clarified. Sometimes, especially in older papers, I saw such clarifications. This, I think, is a very good practice not only for theses and it should become common for publishing papers nowadays.
After all, I think that responsibility for ethical aspects should also rest to students, not only to supervisor. It is impossible and not necessary to control every step which students take, so this means that they should also be responsible while proceeding experiments. At the same time, students should not rely only on supervisor’s ethical principles, they should have their own and in case if it is needed to behave according to them. Especially this can be useful in some extreme situations. Anywaythe responsibility to ensure that everything goes in accordance with ethical principlesstill should be left mainly to supervisor.
In chapter 7.2 it was pointed out that the teacher is in position of power in relation to the students. In order to exclude both overestimation and underestimation of students’ knowledge at least during exams, there should be possibilities to give examination without knowing students’ identities. This is of course possible only for written examinations, but besides that it would be a good thing to process the examinations excluding hand-writing which can be recognized by examiner. For this purpose computer tests and typing can be used.Nevertheless, students can be abused also during their studies. To prevent that, there should be a possibility for them to complain about unacceptable behavior of their teacher and get a corresponding control of this case.
In chapter 7.4 manuscripts for publication are discussed. I think that a system which controls reviewers should be created in order to prevent stealing ideas from manuscripts. This is very common situation that the fields which author and reviewer work in are very close to each other. Thus, this situation can happen quite often.
According to the system which exists nowadays, the identity of authors is usually known. This, I think, should be changed as far as this can lead to causeless rejection of a paper due to bad relationship between author and reviewer. At the same time, identity of reviewers still stays unknown which makes this situation difficult to prevent.
Another aspect which I would like to point at is the quality of reviewers. It was mentioned that it is hard to find willing and competent reviewers. As for me, the biggest problem is the competence of reviewers. Unfortunately, it is quite common situation that reviewer who would like to reviewa paper works in quite different field and do not completely understand the ideas reflected in a paper. This is very dangerous, since there are only three reviewers for each paper, in some cases even less. Possibly this situation can be changed by including some benefits for reviewers, which can be valuable for them. Otherwise, I think it will be still quite hard to find sufficiently competent reviewers.
In chapter 7.5 committee work is discussed. The independency of committee members while making some decisions as for me almost impossible thing. As it was said, it is not only due to their characteristics but also because of the pressure which is put on them from colleagues, department and so on. In these conditions it is very hard to stay unprejudiced, so I think very few people really do so. Another factor also is that almost no one among committee members can staydisinterested, which force others to behave the same way. I think the main way to solve this problem is to control their decisions more precisely. Also committee members should not be involved in decision making in cases which refer to their department, university or colleagues in general. And of course there should be quite many members of committee who make decisions in order to get as many opinions as possible about each case.