PhD 2000 Chemistry.

To up the willy waving stakes…I was awarded mine straight after the viva, as I had zero corrections. Published 16 peer review publications on the subject during the course of it, and quite a few more afterwards :-).

16 peer review publications

Wow!

Final year EngD in Batteries.

Well you’d need to have STW levels of pedantry not to see DEng or DSci or even DLett as being equivalent.

not quite, a DSci is a higher award. I was basing my reply on what you would need for a particular post. In my line of research a DEng isn’t an equivalent. A DEng will be industry focused rather than purely research and will have a significant taught part to it. So while they are both doctorates they differ with the PhD being more academical.

Spent 2 years part time working on heat shock protein 90 inhibition in myeloma.
Did my transfer viva and decided after speaking with my supervisors that sticking with my full time job in leukaemia diagnostics would give me a lot more career options since I already had a masters.

Bit of a regret not finishing but I reckon it would have taken another 6 years part time and I didn’t have the stomach for that.

Now run one if the largest leukaemia diagnosis labs in Britain so could start again in a couple of years once the kids are a bit older and I would pick a project a lot more relevant to my day job!

Wow some quite interesting subject matter, not gone the academia route myself.

Fair play everyone

Junkyard – lazarus

STarted mine 97 but stopped as i realised a career in academia – which was where my research led- was not somethign that appealed to me.
I do have a post grad qual but no PhD. I dont regret the decision but do occasionally wonder f another subject area would have made a difference, I was good at my subject i was just not that interested in it.
C’mon if you were to do one which discipline would be looking at … 😛

angeldust – Member

PhD 2000 Chemistry.

To up the willy waving stakes…I was awarded mine straight after the viva, as I had zero corrections. Published 16 peer review publications on the subject during the course of it, and quite a few more afterwards :-).
OK I am interested in finding if you a lecturer now or what? I need to advice my nephew to go into PhD … apart from using his knowledge to produce crack cocaine of the future. 😀

poah – Member
So while they are both doctorates they differ with the PhD being more academical.

Think me mates told something along that too a while back …

alansd1980 – Member
Bit of a regret not finishing but I reckon it would have taken another 6 years part time and I didn’t have the stomach for that.
Income comes first if you are not loaded …

If I were to do one I guess I would research into human logic … ya …

angeldust – Member
PhD 2000 Chemistry.

To up the willy waving stakes…I was awarded mine straight after the viva, as I had zero corrections. Published 16 peer review publications on the subject during the course of it, and quite a few more afterwards :-).
Please say you’re shorter than average, uncoordinated, unfunny and/or less than handsome. 2 from 4 will do.
Seriously, impressive and a link to a couple would be interesting.

97 Palaeoecology stuff in the western isles

In my line of research a DEng isn’t an equivalent. A DEng will be industry focused rather than purely research and will have a significant taught part to it. So while they are both doctorates they differ with the PhD being more academical.

This is true. There is a difference between a ‘professional’ doctorate (of which there are a few, relating to different professions), and an academic doctorate.

Then, among academic doctorates, there are rankings that go back to the middle ages, although not generally regarded except in academic processions.

EDIT: While I’m at it, can I just say how lonely it is so far as the only person on here with a pure humanities-based degree?

Mine (PhD) & the wife (Eng D) in Materials Engineering from Cranfield Uni…. I did do some post doc and lecturing but moved to industry recently

1998, Atmospheric Physics – “Modelling of Equatorial Wave Motions in the Middle Atmosphere” (D.Phil)

Interesting and fun to do (and a couple of years post-doc) but I realised I was better at the computer parts than the physics/research parts and have been working in IT since 2000 – generally trying to find areas where a physics background is useful.

2003, Signal Processing – “Application of patch based super-resolution techniques to CCTV video enhancement”. Amazingly I managed to covert that into a career!

What is this? Ethics related? Green environmental stuff?

My work was largely management theory based (Business School PhD) but yeah, I came at it from a background in geography and then an environmental science Masters so there was plenty of that stuff in it 😉

PhD 2001 integrated vehicle chassis control with first degree in mechanical engineering

anagallis_arvensis – Member
2003 ish I think.
Pennine hay meadows

I saw some learned work on Hay Meadows when staying in a Swaledale farm. I wonder if it had your input. I had a look around for it but couldn’t remember the name.

1993. PhD in computational neuroscience. Did about seven years post doc work in academia before moving to industry.

And angledust; 16 papers while doing your PhD? How the hell did you manage that?

2016 PhD Carbon Capture and Storage (specifically “Metal mobility in sandstones and the environmental impact of offshore geological CO2 storage” or something like that!).

In my experience, those with early prolific publishing records are/were part of a large research team working on a particular project, and so end up as 2nd, 3rd, 12th authors on lots of related work. Not to dismiss angledust’s achievements 😉 (I’ve yet to publish anything in 4.5 years…)

DrJ – Member

Can’t remember when. Subject was earthquake prediction. You may have noticed that earthquakes are still unpredictable, so I guess I failed
Which Uni?

Slowoldman was it this?
http://www.summerfieldbooks.com/hay-time-in-the-yorkshire-dales~3146

has my name in it a few times, but funnily enough it doesnt reference the paper I wrote on the method of meadow restoration which the hay time project is based on.

2010, AI

Work in a related field now, trying to make space robots smarter (or do interesting things on earth)

DPhil 2017 Oceanography – Estimates of carbon uptake by different-sized plankton using satellites.

Might do a post-doc but don’t see a family-friendly future in academia unless I get very lucky.

Different fields have differing rates of publication. Many chemists I work with consider ~3 first author publications a year for a postdoc to be about right but in Plant Sciences 1 a year in a decent journal would be very good going. Theoretical mathematicians and electrical engineers of my acquaintance seem to publish something every 8 weeks!

Some disciplines also include conference proceedings as publications while others don’t. This could add 2-3 “publications” a year without real extra effort.

Citations per paper is generally now taken as a more meaningful assessment of contribution to the field rather than the number of papers published as it demonstrates that others value and use your research.

So, all in all, the number of publications is fairly meaningless unless you know how the particular field works and can compare to field specific publication and citation rates.

Slowoldman was it this?
http://www.summerfieldbooks.com/hay-time-in-the-yorkshire-dales~3146

No I think it was more of a technical tome. Actually I’m inclined to say “Restoration”was part of the title.

On the publication and citation points, it’s a very inexact science. A few random thoughts-

Different disciplines have very different expectations- synthetic chemistry can be: Make crystal, determine crystal structure, publish; rinse and repeat. Ten or a dozen papers from a thesis isn’t uncommon. By contrast, some of my better students have ended up boiling down 3-4 years of work and an entire PhD thesis into a single 20 page journal paper.

Size of research group is an important influence as stated above.

Biological sciences have been known to take the view ‘First author, last author or nowhere’. Other disciplines (e.g. geosciences) don’t seem to care. Computer sciences is all in conference proceedings; they don’t care about journals.

Citation rate is a very flawed metric because it depends strongly on the size of the global research community in that area. None of my most highly cited papers are actually in my main area of work (nuclear security and nuclear safety), though I would argue that area is far more important than the more highly cited sidelines. The problem is that there are very few sad nuclear obsessives out there, so you don’t tick up the citations.

Lots more I could say, but you’d all just get bored

Citations per paper is generally now taken as a more meaningful assessment of contribution to the field rather than the number of papers published as it demonstrates that others value and use your research.

totally flawed method though as are impact factors. my last publication, september, is likely to get published frequently because its novel but as a paper its pretty uninteresting and not a huge amount of info in it. My first paper has been cited over 120 times but again its basically an observation but because it was novel its been cited a few times.

Journal imapact factors can be manipulated because it works on citations.

totally flawed method though as are impact factors. my last publication, september, is likely to get published frequently because its novel but as a paper its pretty uninteresting and not a huge amount of info in it. My first paper has been cited over 120 times but again its basically an observation but because it was novel its been cited a few times.

Genuine novelty is hard to come by, poah, as your highly cited work shows. It is the sine qua non of science – your latest paper cannot be simultaneously novel and pretty uninteresting.

Citation rates and h-indexes boil down scientific content into a single number, so obv they’re flawed by definition (and equally obv they are loved by research administrators). No way are they totally flawed, though – things like h-indices are necessary, but not suffient, criteria for demonstrating the influence and impact of your research.
So an h-index of 40 would be quite high in my field (chemistry) but I could easily think of a few pedestrians with that sort of output. Older guys who work hard and keep busy in the right areas, but have never done anything original.
OTOH, you can’t say your research is having an impact in chemistry if you’re mid-career and have an h-index of 15, say. There are some exceptional, Nobel-winning cases, of course, but by and large if no one is citing your stuff then there’s a reason for that.

Citations are only a vaguely useful metric within a narrow field not between them. As I said earlier but no one seems inclined to quote….

Journal impact factors are a waste of time though. Publisher and lazy assessing body sponsored circle jerking at best.

The only real judgement of scientific worth and relevance comes from other scientists. Sadly governments don’t like that.

@MrOvershoot – was at Embra 🙂

Ahh North of the boarder, just thought it might have been Bristol.

PhD in Computational and Theoretical Physics, finally completed in 2010.
Non-Equilibrium Molecular Dynamics and Transport Phenomina

This is one hell of a willy waving thread.

Interesting comment. You could say the same thing of a “who’s got a degree” question. Anyone without one might think it’s willy waving.

A PhD is 3 years of learning how to do academic research. If you’ve not done one it sounds really difficult. I was in awe of people who had one before I started mine and after I was awarded I realised that half the people who got one (well those in my research group) were really poor. By the end you know a bit about how to research. Post-doc is where you then start to apply what you learned. In the same way that a degree grad knows the basics of their subject.

It’s not unlike doing a degree – after A levels it seems really difficult (or it did before they were cheapened) but afterwards you realise it wasn’t that difficult.

I must say I am in awe of everyone here who has the dedication and drive to stick to a phd or anything above a degree for that matter. I can’t comprehend how you guys manage it.

It was the best 3 years I’ve ever had. 3 years of working on a subject I really enjoyed, reading around and trying to replicate techniques to my field, getting frustrated when it didn’t go as planned and having a week in the pub, then working all night and getting some amazing results.

Imaging being able to have all the time you want to work on something that interests you.

The hard bit is writing the thesis.

1990 Organic Chemistry
now a Reader in Medicinal Chemistry doing cancer drug discovery.

Journal impact factors are a waste of time though.

I agree, but try telling that to the REF panels and University Administrators…

your latest paper cannot be simultaneously novel and pretty uninteresting.

its novel because it shows somthing different to the current structures of the family of domains but its uninteresting cause it doesn’t show any function.

This is one hell of a willy waving thread.

its not really. a PhD isn’t really that hard to do for anyone with a modicum of intelligence and determination.

Part time PhD (whilst working full-time) on strengthening concrete by gluing things to it, awarded back in the late 90s.

Back in those days only 1 in 4 who registered for a degree by research (PhD or MPhil) actually ended up getting one, so not that easy to get ……………..