Graduate Students Need to Publish Papers

 
In my field it takes five, or even six, years to complete a Ph.D. program. This time could be significantly reduced if there wasn't pressure on students to produce publishable work. The reduction in time is even more obvious at the M.Sc. level where it often take far more than two years to get a degree.

One could make a case for an M.Sc. degree that was not a "research" oriented degree. These programs would be useful for high school teachers, for example, or patent attorneys, or even physicians.

But those are exceptions. In most research departments the thesis is based on scientific research. Does that research have to produce results that can be published in the scientific literature? Yes it does.

T. Ryan Gregory explains why [Why would advisors encourage students to publish?]. (This is a repost of an article that he published earlier on Genomicron but it's still relevant and topical, especially in our department where we are grappling with the issue of long times to completion.)

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[Photo Credit: Graduate students in the Department of Biochemistry 2007-2008.]