Listening to PhD students present their ideas it strikes me that sometimes we need to realise that doing research is about taking risks. OK, the risks may be controlled risks but we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that just replicating what others have done with a minor amendment is not going to be ground breaking.
It would be good if more students took a few risks with their topic. So what if the research fails to some extent. We often learn more from research failures than successes. Failures, or unanticipated outcomes, stretch us, and make us think more deeply. This enables us ask big questions and allows us to philosophize. A PhD is after all a Doctor of Philosophy!
www.CompletePhD.com
It would be good if more students took a few risks with their topic. So what if the research fails to some extent. We often learn more from research failures than successes. Failures, or unanticipated outcomes, stretch us, and make us think more deeply. This enables us ask big questions and allows us to philosophize. A PhD is after all a Doctor of Philosophy!
www.CompletePhD.com
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Newly minted Ph.D. (particularly those who have come from an all-academic background and thus are relatively young) are likely to be risk-averse. Small gains that can possibly get you published (particularly by piggybacking off of well-supported, published material) are a much lower risk than new work.
ReplyDeleteIt would be immensely helpful to the science community in general to have a framework of publication for negative results. They're rarely published, so they are undoubtedly replicated by different scientists all asking the same question. Since they can't find negative results in the outstanding literature, they go ahead and design a study, which gives them negative results, so they don't publish, so the next scientist that comes along... (repeat).
Whatever "new" publication model the community settles on in the next decade will hopefully be more accepting of failure as worthy of publication :)