Like the article I blogged about on Tuesday, this 2019 article by Kenneth Clements (University of Western Australia) and the late Jiawen Si, published in the journal Australian Economic Review, had been sitting in my to-be-read pile for far too long until I read it last week. Clements and Si provide a description of what Australian economics PhDs do, based mostly on the experience of UWA doctoral students. Although dated, I thought this article provided some interesting insights, such as:
Until recently, that PhD thesis was of the nature of a research monograph, but increasingly is a collection of three core chapters that deal with different aspects of a problem. These chapters are more or less self-contained and are structured such that they could be submitted to a journal with only modest editing.
In New Zealand, most universities now offer a PhD with publication (using the terminology of my institution), and in economics, almost all PhD students go through that pathway. Along with most of my colleagues, I won't consider accepting a PhD student who simply wants to write a single monograph (although that was the form of my own PhD thesis). As Clements and Si note:
The change facilitates subsequent publication of the chapters and has the advantage of dividing up a large study into smaller, more manageable elements that might be easier to complete through greater focus of students’ (and supervisors’) attention. A possible disadvantage of this model is that students no longer gain experience in producing a book-length monograph, but this is probably of minor consequence in the current environment in which the value of books is usually considerably less than the equivalent number of articles.
In my view, student's academic CV is much stronger if it includes a number of high-quality publications, rather than a single thesis monograph. And since most PhD students are aiming to become academics after graduation, the monograph seems like a substantially inferior option.
One aspect of the PhD programmes that surprised me was how many Australian universities require a coursework component of the PhD. Clements and Si look across 13 Australian universities (including all of the Group of Eight), and note that:
...five universities—the Australian National University (ANU), Melbourne, Monash, the University of NSW (UNSW) and the University of Queensland—now have a compulsory coursework component of their PhD requirements. Presumably, this is designed to provide guidance and tools for the subsequent thesis research and to produce graduates whose broader training in economics might benefit their subsequent careers.
It's also likely that those five universities (all of which are in the Group of Eight) have coursework requirements because it more closely mimics the US format of PhD studies, which many more of their academic staff will likely have experienced. As far as I am aware, no New Zealand universities have a coursework requirement as part of their PhD programme, although there may be optional papers that PhD students can take. And of course, many PhD students will 'audit' postgraduate papers, such as in econometrics, in order to develop their research skills.
Finally, Clements and Si look at the outputs from the PhD, focusing on UWA students, and find that:
On average, two publications come out of a thesis... However, if those who publish nothing are excluded, about 3.5 publications emerge from the average thesis. Using the Australian Business Deans Council ranking, roughly 30 per cent of these publications are in highly ranked journals, that is, those ranked A or A*...
That seems not too dissimilar from our students, although I have only ever had one PhD student who completed and published more than three articles directly from their PhD thesis. The high ranking of those publications at UWA probably reflects the high quality of supervision available there.
Anyway, it is interesting to see what Australian economics PhD students do, albeit as of 2019, and to recognise that it is not dissimilar from what happens for New Zealand economics PhDs.
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