The Curious Case of Doctoral Theses

A few days ago, a disturbing news item gained some currency when it arried the disclosure that a leading international journal of science had to retract many research papers published by the journal.

- Dinesh Singh

Of course, it does happen that occasionally the peer review process does falter for a variety of reasons but a near wholesale retraction stretched over a not-too-lengthy period does create some anxiety. One offshoot was that my concerns about the quality of several journals that are being published in India were triggered and thus as a natural corollary I began to mull the rather inadequate quality of PhDs being produced.

Let me state at the outset that at no stage am I implying that all doctoral theses produced in Indian universities are of a dismal quality. In fact, I keep coming across some extremely good dissertations. My worry is that the number of rather poor doctoral theses has been growing at an alarming rate.