Wednesday, 21 June 2017

phd - Why is novelty mandatory for a Ph.D. degree?


The institute I am studying at has added the following requirement recently:



A PhD scholar must publish two papers in his/her corresponding field in SCI journals.



This means that a student cannot get PhD without two SCI rated papers. To the best of my knowledge, novelty is a mandate for such journals; hence, novelty has became mandatory for a student to get PhD in my institute.


In this context, I have the following query: Why is novelty mandatory for a PhD degree?


Consider a scenario in which a student is ambitious and wants to do research on an open problem or famous unsolved problem in his/her field. The student cannot attempt to research such a topic since research may be locally saturated, and he/she cannot come up with a novel idea. Does the rule not restrict the research on such problems? I can see the alternatives like tutorial papers, survey papers, etc., but some of these require only highly experienced geeks.


Note: Assume that neither the PhD student nor the PhD supervisor is an extraordinary person in that particular field.





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