What Makes Productive Doctoral Student?

Recently, scholars from France, the Netherlands and Italy investigated and studied the main factors affecting doctoral production [1], and they investigated the main factors affecting doctoral production in STEM students graduated from France from 2000 to 2014.

1.Factors affecting the production of doctoral student

The following are the results of the research conclusion part of the article and the results of regression analysis, they selected the number of articles published by doctoral students as the output index, the average citation volume of published articles as the output quality index, and the number of co-authors of published articles of doctoral students as an indicator to measure the size of the scientific research cooperation network.

We consider the supervisor and peers’ biographic and academic characteristics as relevant social environment characteristics. Then, we measure the student’s productivity by counting the number of articles published during the training period (publication quantity), calculating the average number of citations received by the published articles (publication quality), and counting the number of distinct co-authors during the training period (scientific network size).

According to the above data research and statistical analysis results, the environment and atmosphere of the doctoral student’s research group and the factors of the supervisor are one of the important factors affecting the output of the doctoral student under the condition of not considering the doctoral student’s own conditions.

• The relationship between doctoral students, supervisors and peers greatly affects the output efficiency of doctoral students, and the supported doctoral production efficiency is relatively high.
• Female supervisors who are in the middle of their career development and have national research fund funding programs usually produce the most efficiently.
• Ph.D student are usually produced more efficiently in smaller research groups, which are mixed and mixed.

2.Research conclusions and suggestions

The study’s findings show that some of the study’s findings are consistent with previous findings [2]:

The survey aimed to explore the Ph.D. students’ perception of French Ph.D. programs. Results show that most respondents favor small-size teamwork with 2–3 students per supervisor. Consistently, half of the students declaring a lack of thesis progress is mentored by supervisors having more than four Ph.D. students simultaneously. Furthermore, the report shows that students evaluate the supervisor’s role as fundamental in supporting the thesis progress and ensuring the financial conditions to carry out the research work.

Based on the above research analysis, the authors make the following suggestions for doctoral school leaders and relevant policy makers:

• Modify and raise the selection criteria ¹ for doctoral supervisors as appropriate to ensure that doctoral supervisors can have higher academic achievements (high-quality articles and research project funds).
• Revise and appropriately limit the number of PhD students that supervisors can supervise at the same time to ensure that supervisors have sufficient time and funds to guide and support students’ research projects.
• For newly promoted supervisors who have never fully supervised doctoral students, they should be more motivated to actively participate in the guidance of learning Help them gain more experience mentoring students to reduce risk.

3.Concluding remarks

According to the above research, it can be found that exclude the own factors and reasons of doctoral student, the productivity of the doctoral student is largely affected by external factors (research project direction, supervisor support, research group atmosphere, etc.). Just like sometimes even for the same person, his productivity may be different at the master’s and doctoral stage, some people have a very average productivity at the master’s stage and a very good productivity at the doctoral stage, and vice versa. Therefore, as a doctoral student, there is no need to compare with others doctoral student, just listen to your own heart and do your own research according to your plan.

References

[1] Corsini, A., Pezzoni, M., Visentin, F.” What makes a productive Ph. D. student?.” Research Policy (2022): 104561.

[2] Pommier, S., Talby, M., Auffray-Seguette, M., Dalaut, M., Eijsberg, H., Elshawish, P. and Muller, H., Le doctorat en France Regards croisés sur la formation doctorale. Diss. Réseau National de Collèges Doctoraux, 2022.