A few days ago, Tsinghua University's doctoral graduation requirements were reformed, and "the number of academic papers" was no longer regarded as a hard requirement for graduation. On this topic, I always want to find a chance to talk about my own ideas.

When I was a doctor, the basic requirement of the University for doctoral graduates was to publish one Chinese key journal and two Chinese core journals. In the first semester of my master's degree, a thesis was employed by a key Chinese Journal, and my tutor was stunned at that time. Later, the school raised the requirement to publish at least one English paper. Therefore, for a period of time, the number of international conference papers retrieved by EI began to soar. Later, the requirements of the University were further improved, and doctoral students were required to publish one SCI paper and two EI papers, or two SCI papers. As a result, more and more doctoral students are forced to postpone their graduation due to the substandard number of theses. As a result, many people call for the abolition of the requirement for doctoral dissertation. In my opinion, it is of great significance for doctoral students to publish certain academic papers when they graduate. Now that China has become a big country of thesis, it is time to change from a large number of thesis to a large number of thesis with both quality and quantity. Therefore, it is of progressive significance to cancel the "rigid requirement" that doctoral students must publish a certain number of academic papers.

Has the final say that the graduate students of many developed countries have no rigid requirements for the number of academic papers published, and whether their doctoral students can graduate is basically the final say of the tutor. For doctoral students from top universities such as Cambridge and Oxford, not every student can publish a lot of academic papers. Especially for some doctoral students funded by enterprise projects, the funding of the project is dead, and the students will no longer have financial support when they reach the graduation period. Even if the doctoral students do not publish an academic thesis during the semester, their tutors will also let the students finish the thesis quickly and graduate. However, for the vast majority of other doctoral students, even if the university does not require academic papers to be published during the semester, they will publish some papers more or less when they graduate.

What kind of doctoral students can graduate without publishing academic papers? I think engineering doctoral students can not publish high-level academic papers, and their assessment can be innovative technology, innovative invention, or specific engineering contribution. Especially those students who want to work in the business sector after their doctorate graduation may not publish academic papers, and their future work will be mainly engineering applications. In addition, personnel engaged in secret related scientific research may not publish papers. Their achievements can be fully evaluated by their tutors. There is a super Daniel professor in the field of metallurgy in Canada. One of his doctoral students didn't publish a thesis during the semester, but the professor was very optimistic about the doctoral student's work, so he helped him write a heavy recommendation letter when he was looking for a job after graduation, and the other company directly hired him without even asking for an interview.

However, it is suggested that doctoral students in general science should publish some academic papers. Now there is a very practical reality. Many doctoral students from famous universities in Britain, Australia and other countries have graduated, but they can't find suitable jobs when they return home. The reason is that they didn't publish a certain number of academic papers during their doctoral period, and they couldn't meet the basic requirements of recruitment in domestic universities. Therefore, if the doctoral students in general science in domestic universities do not publish several academic papers, it will be more difficult for them to develop in the future. As for how many academic papers a doctoral student should publish, or what level of academic papers he should publish, I think it varies from person to person and from subject to subject. However, if a doctoral candidate wants to continue to engage in academic research in the future, a basic suggestion is to strive to publish more than three academic papers in the mainstream journals of his research direction, because when looking for a job, he usually needs three representative works.

Next to the above topic, I would like to discuss whether a professor should write a thesis?

A few days ago, a professor talked about this situation: comparing the materials of some associate professors and regular professors applying for doctoral tutor qualification, the "materials" of most associate professors include papers, funds, etc. This shows that the "ability (or motivation)" of professors to write papers and apply for funds is not as strong as that of associate professors. It is understandable that associate professors are full of energy in writing papers and funds. It's true that young teachers who don't want to be professors are not good teachers. To be a professor, there must be a certain number of academic papers. Most of the young friends next to me are very energetic and are trying to make good achievements. On the contrary, for teachers who have obtained the title of Professor, the motivation of writing papers should be more pure. They publish papers to prove that they are still in the academic circle and have not retired.

However, can professors not publish academic papers? I think non secret teaching and research professors should publish a certain number of academic papers every year. Of course, for professors, they don't have to write their own papers, either by their graduate students or by their postdoctoral students. However, the ideas must be from professors. To put it to the extreme, if a professor does not even have a nominal academic paper a year, I think it is unqualified. On the contrary, professors should strive to publish high-level academic papers. Generally speaking, professors have no pressure on the number of academic papers. Therefore, if they write papers, they must strive to write high-level papers. Remember the classification of ear journals in Australia, they defined a * and a * journals as journals that professors should try to publish. Although we have not mentioned a * and a journals for a long time, everyone has a steelyard in mind whether a journal is excellent or not. In some journals, the impact factor is high, but the level of papers is not high. The impact factor of some journals is low, but a lot of big cattle have published papers on it. If a person has already become a full professor, just like a graduate student, he simply pursues influence factors instead of influence, it is absolutely sad. In addition, if a university wants to improve the quality of its published papers, it is very difficult for professors to write papers themselves.

To sum up, for the vast majority of doctoral students, if they want to continue to engage in academic work in the future, they should strive to publish more than three papers in mainstream academic journals. For professors, we should pursue publishing influential academic achievements.