LAUSR

I would argue that PhD students need a system of accreditation of creativity in the absence of publication such that their development of curiosity can be actively fostered at this crucial time in their career. To create an environment in which it is “safe” to place a little more emphasis on free thinking and exploration rather than standard production of results, it would be useful to have a system that recognizes what I refer to as “creatively-obtained negative results”. Some PhD students call them “Friday afternoon experiments”; others talk more generally about the need to have some freedom to explore. These days it’s a hard job to reconcile the necessity in many countries to publish papers in order to obtain a PhD. What is the result? Well, knowing that across all PhD students in the world a vast variety of different types of paper are published, all we can say is that the result of such conditions is a PhD student with publications regardless of their quality in terms of scientific thought. What is even more important, however, for the development of vibrant research is a PhD student whose curiosity has been developed. I’ll venture a comparison here: the support of curiosity in PhD students is, on average, as likely to produce good research as the support of basic research is likely to produce