The thesis defense and publication absurdity: Universities that do not trust their own diplomas

The decline in academic quality in our country is common knowledge. Interesting remedies are being tried to counter this decline. One of these interesting and "absurd" remedies is the requirement that, before defending a doctoral thesis, the candidate must have received an acceptance letter for an article produced from the thesis to be published in a peer-reviewed journal of a certain standard. In this way, the production of a thesis that has "contributed to the literature" will be guaranteed. At least, that is the idea behind this remedy. (I feel it is my duty to mention the name of my professor, Prof. Dr. Ali Murat Özdemir, who inspired this article with his comments, on this occasion.) 

The remedy is "interesting." Because it finds the cure for the decline of academia by trusting the evaluations of reviewers selected from within the same declined academia, while not trusting the evaluations of the academics on the thesis monitoring committee and the thesis jury. Think about it. For example, we do not trust the competence of the esteemed professors of Marmara University in evaluating a thesis. But we trust the evaluations of a few reviewers, whose identities are unknown, regarding a 20-30 page article. 

Are we aware of the problems this remedy brings with it? Let me give good news to my fellow lawyers. There is a fertile problem here in terms of litigation. Let us elaborate on the subject a little more...

First of all, the peer-review process for an article in high-quality journals often takes more than 1 year. In this case, even if they have produced a high-quality article, a doctoral candidate whose graduation is limited by time due to Higher Education Council (YÖK) regulations and the relevant university's graduate regulations is left at the mercy of an unpredictable process. Most of the time, since they cannot send an article to multiple journals at the same time due to rules regarding plagiarism and academic ethics, the candidate will have to act by taking into account the rejection periods of the journals. Therefore, the publication or acceptance of the article will take an unpredictable amount of time. This is contrary to administrative law and equity. Just because of this, if they do not send the article to a sufficiently high-quality journal, the purpose will not be achieved this time either. While trying to increase quality, we will have created a new burden. Candidates will turn to journals where peer review results are concluded in a short time and the rejection rate is low, or worse, the number of such journals will increase. 

Secondly, let us say that our candidate produced a wonderful article or a reputable journal to which they sent their article found it wonderful and published it within the time limit. This time, the thesis jury will be influenced by the weight of this journal and, perhaps fearing legal trouble, will graduate a candidate they do not actually find sufficient. 

Another problem manifests itself in discussions of plagiarism and originality. First of all, a doctoral thesis must be original. It must make a meaningful and original contribution to the literature. If a part of the thesis or the entire thesis is published in article format before the doctoral thesis is defended, the originality of the thesis disappears. The originality aimed at with a doctoral thesis is crippled by the compulsion of the regulation to publish an article produced from the prepared thesis before the thesis is defended in order to graduate from the doctorate. 

Let us assume we have solved the originality problem. There is another completely different problem waiting for us. In associate professorship applications, publications made before the doctorate and publications made after the doctorate are scored differently. Under these circumstances, in what status will the publication made by the doctoral candidate before defending the thesis be evaluated in order to be able to defend the doctoral thesis? Let us say that the date the article was accepted for publication is before the thesis defense, but the publication date is after graduation... Is the situation of this person different or not from a candidate whose acceptance and publication dates are both before graduation? Or let us say we have an academically productive candidate. They made many publications before defending their doctoral thesis. However, these publications are also related to the content of the thesis. In this case, let one of these publications be one of the publications required to defend the doctoral thesis. Is it fair to count this publication as one produced from the doctorate and a post-doctoral publication, while counting the others as pre-doctoral publications? 

Let us say our candidate is working on a thesis that is very contrary to the mainstream. Therefore, they are defending a very original position. In this case, is the probability of this candidate's article being accepted the same as the probability of an article being accepted from a candidate who defends views compatible with the mainstream? First of all, the number of journals both can apply to will be very different. The peer-review processes of journals outside the mainstream will work more slowly. Therefore, acceptance or rejection decisions will be notified later. On the other hand, due to the small number of these journals, the number of articles that can be published will also be small. Because of this inequality and difficulty, candidates will be pushed to write theses compatible with the mainstream. This will increase academic decline and blindness, and make it difficult for originality to emerge. 

Let us return to the beginning of the discussion. Do the professors on the doctoral thesis jury have no judgment? Do we not trust their wisdom, knowledge, discretion, and power of reasoning? Are we not afraid that candidates will seek legal assistance and sue all their doctoral graduation processes? Perhaps we do not trust the wisdom of the candidates. Who knows?