PhD on Michael’s Domain

JuFo ranking: A Worse Impact Factor?

Sat, 02 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Changes to the Finnish PhD educationAll Finnish universities are lowering the requirements for a doctoral thesis. Instead of 3 to 4 publications, you can now defend your thesis with 2 to 3. One argument favoring this change was to create a level playing field with other countries. None of the big European countries requires any publications to get a PhD: Neither Great Britain, Germany, France, or Italy do. The other Scandinavian countries are the only other European countries that have (or have had) similar requirements with respect to the number of required publications, with Sweden being almost on par with the Finnish system.If international harmonization was the goal, the change should have been more radical, i.e., get rid of any requirement for publications. However, the new rules just ensure that we lose in quality what we gain in quantity. I prefer fewer but better-educated PhDs, but our current government apparently just wants to bump up the number of PhDs that Finland produces. Publish of perishI fear that the push towards a shorter PhD might decrease the quality of the publications. PhD students are now under pressure to get three papers out in 3 to 4 years. As soon as the “smallest publishable unit” has been produced, it is pushed out into the world. Few research groups have the luxury of postponing publishing research results for a long time because the publish-or-perish culture is still flourishing. While Finland has abandoned the impact factor (good), we have replaced it with a less transparent system (bad). The currently used metric in Finland is the JuFo system, where journals get ranked into classes 0-3 based on “expert consensus opinion.” JuFo is the abbreviation of Julkaisufoorumi (“Publication forum”).Since everybody (including experts) has their preferred go-to journals, this opens the door to bias and even manipulation. There are plentiful examples of highly respected, 10+ impact factor journals with astronomically high rejection rates that were for a long time classified as JuFo 1, until - after a rotation of members in the respective JuFo panel - they were finally bumped to level 2. Why is there such a thing as JuFo rankings in the first place? One argument is that the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) does not account for the individual differences in the publication and citation cultures between different research fields. These differences are huge, but after classifying all journals into individual categories (e.g., clinical medicine versus languages versus agriculture, etc.), one could develop a compensation formula (perhaps even including manually assigned compensation factors) to adjust the JIF for such inter-discipline differences. A software script could do all the work of the JuFo panels automatically and transparently. Bibliometrics researchers have proposed such better alternatives to the JIF. Please drop me an email if you think that I am missing something here! Anecdotes versus dataHaving a system that allows for “manual” downgrading of journals is certainly a good thing. I also endorse JuFo’s attempt to solicit individual researchers’ feedback. However, when you count the number of journals JUFO needs to evaluate, you will see that gathering feedback from 180 individual scientists’ experiences and then downgrading 60 journals based on this feedback has issues. That’s what happened a few years back. If we assume that ALL feedback has been negative and ALL negative feedback has resulted in a downgrade, there will be a tiny number of cases for each journal. In the parlor of evidence-based medicine, some of these cases might be anecdotes. Don’t get me wrong: These decisions are probably not wrong, and neither is it wrong to gather feedback from researchers. In fact, my own experience with one of the downgraded journals (International Journal of Molecular Sciences) is pretty much indicative of predatory publishing. However, the data underlying these decisions is not the best, and it would be surprising if every single one of these decisions would hold up to scrutiny. It is difficult to imagine how such feedback could avoid bias. It’s self-reporting, and researchers might be incentivized to report negative experiences. Grading on the curveAnother little-known fact is that JuFo is a zero-sum game. Journals cannot be freely distributed over the four categories, but JuFo uses a variation of “grading on a curve”: No more than 10% of the articles published in journals for a specific JuFo panel (e.g., for Chemical sciences) are allowed to fall into JuFo category 3. This accounts for differences in publication volume between fields. However, if we - the scientific community - improve the quality of our publication output generally, this will not be reflected in the JuFo ranking. That is, in my opinion, wrong (for the same pedagogical reasons that schools are discouraged from grading pupils on a curve). **Decisions behind closed doors?**The second big issue is transparency. The fact that I have to speculate in the paragraph above about the numbers that have led to the downgrades is worrisome:

The Finnish 1000 PhDs pilot

Tue, 28 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The Finnish government is going to finance 1000 additional new fully funded doctoral positions, which would start in the academic year 2024/2025.The money (85000€/year for each PhD student) will be competitively distributed between Finnish universities, and some of that money will be used to pay for the salary of the PhD students for three years. Perhaps one of the triggers for this initiative is that Finland has been falling behind in the OECD statistics in the number of highly educated workers. The question is whether this one-time expense will really increase the level of education or only boost the numbers.The average duration of a PhD education is around seven years in Finland. In order to pull off a 3-year PhD education at such a large scale, it is expected that the requirements for the PhD will be lowered. As a matter of fact, the requirements have already been lowered, but further “easings” might still come. Together with these, universities are aiming to streamline the kafkaesque absurd and medieval administration process, which can easily take half a year from the time of completing the last manuscript to receiving the actual PhD certificate.Many other outlets have reported about this pilot; here’s one that is available also in English: https://acatiimi.fi/2023/11/28/for-once/Although most people are happy about the additional money, almost everybody is sceptical to some degree. Good intentions are not enough, and there are many serious issues with this pilot:

Congratulations, Dr. Khushbu Rauniyar!

Sat, 10 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Defending a PhD thesis is a BIG thing in Finland, and you just did it. Unlike the rest of the world (perhaps except for Sweden), no other country requires as much demonstration of perseverance from PhD candidates as Finland does. On average, it takes four publications and 7 years. The long duration and the lack of well-defined requirements are two problems the Finnish Ministry of Education wants to address over the next few years to level the playing field for Finnish PhD graduates in the international job market. Completing a PhD in Finland takes a lot of Sisu. Sisu is a Finnish word which cannot be translated into any other language, but the recent movie with the same title can give you an idea. Wikipedia defines Sisu as extraordinary determination in the face of extreme adversity .In the “old times”, drugs were discovered based on their effects while not knowing their mechanism of action. This paradigm is more and more turned on its head. Researchers try to understand the mechanism that leads to disease before they start developing or finding a drug. Much of Khushbu’s thesis is about better understanding the mechanisms that govern the action of the primary lymphangiogenic growth factor VEGF-C: The evolutionary origin, activation, and potential as a drug target . Prof. Eckhard Lammert did a great job as the opponent, and Prof. Kari Keinänen did the same as the custos. Dear Khushbu , we wish you all the best for your next big project!

Brain drain from Finland continues

Fri, 22 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Finland is educating its citizens to a very high level, but is not able to keep this highly educated work force in the country. The net balance of university degree holder migration has been negative throughout the last decade and the trend is worsening, especially at the Bachelor’s and Master’s level. At the highest level, the interpretation is not very straightforward, since this group contains Licentiate* holders, PhDs, postdocs as well as professors. However, the negative trend is also stable, but not accelerating as fast as at the lower education levels. In this group the brain drain occurs selectively to the best countries with just 5 top countries absorbing 66% of the most highly educated migrants (USA, Great Britain, Switzerland, Germany and Sweden), while the lower degree holders are not as selective (52% of MSc and 41% of BSc holders migrate to the same top countries). Unfortunately, this statistic only reports the migration of Finnish citizens. In order to get a complete picture, one would need the same data for the migration of non-Finnish citizens. For this graph, the data from Statistics Finland was used ( http://www.stat.fi/til/muutl/2016/02/muutl_2016_02_2017-12-18_tie_001_fi.html) . All countries were grouped according to better or worse scientific output than Finland in the comparison (Nature Index, Weighted fractionalcount, https://www.natureindex.com/country-outputs/generate/All/global/All/weighted_score) . Countries that performed better thanFinland in 2016 were: USA, China, Germany, United Kingdom, Japan, France, Canada, Switzerland, South Korea, Spain, India, Italy,Australia, Netherlands, Israel, Sweden, Singapore, Russia, Taiwan, Belgium, Austria, Denmark, Brazil, Poland.* Licentiate is a degree specific to Finland and a several other countries, which is somewhere between a MSc and a PhD. In Finland, it has been decreasing in importance over the years since there is no equivalent in many other countries.

Overrun by the Big Wheel?

Fri, 24 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Despite focus on internationalization English information about education reform incomplete and lateThe Big Wheel reform is rolling over me and I don’t notice it. There has been some information in English about the process on the University’s intranet . However, during the drafting, most of the documents were initially only available in Finnish and due to the delay caused by translation, foreign staff without English language proficiency was largely excluded from the process. Loosing this input was certainly not helpful, since several goals of the Big Wheel reform are related to internationalization, e.g. harmonizing the degree structures within Europe (“3+2+3 system”) and making the degree programmes internationally attractive and competitive.Excellent students potentially excluded from studying at our UniversityConcluding from the application numbers for the Master’s programmes that’ll start in September 2017, there is still much work to be done to make the programmes “internationally attractive and competitive”. Virtually all programmes reported a decline in applications from Non-EU/EEA countries, which probably will result in much less income from tuition fees than the university would like (Master’s thesis tuition fees at the University of Helsinki are between 13000 and 18000€/year depending on the programme). We probably loose potentially excellent students and there is a diffuse suspicion that the general level of education might suffer. 30 scholarships of varying amounts are available for Non-EU/EEA students. However, only about 10 of the recipients will be able to completely recoup the tuition fee with their scholarship (see here: https://www.helsinki.fi/en/studying/how-to-apply/scholarship-programme) . I also think that the advertisement for the study programmes could be definitely improved.Information about available scholarships: clear enough or confusing? I also fear that many potential applicants were confused about the scholarship programme (so was I, and still am). Our own Master’s programme’s web pages ( https://www.helsinki.fi/en/programmes/master/translational-medicine-transmed ) do not mention the scholarships prominently (or was that on purpose?). Even worse, the link on the Helsinki University’s pages to check whether or not a student is required to pay the tuition fee has been half dead for a while (“You can check this FAQ at the Studyinfo website whether or not you are required to pay tuition fees” (original on this page ). Hopefully it died only after the application deadline finished…Educational reform of the PhD degreeThe Big Wheel reform concerns all three degrees: Bachelor’s, Master’s and Doctorate (PhD). Internationalization is especially relevant to the PhD degree and those Master’s programmes that are entirely in English (e.g. Translational Medicine or Life Science Informatics). Even though about half all PhD students in my unit (Research Programs Unit) are foreigners, hardly any of them knows what the “Big Wheel” is about. Big Wheel discussion at Meilahti campusAfter almost all is set and done, an info event about the Big Wheel was announced for the Meilahti campus (31.3.2017). The e-mail message was exclusively in Finnish. I often have given feedback when important events were not announced in English (more often than not getting no response). That’s why I wrote a message straight to the rector and the vice rector of the university. The e-mail conversation is attached below. Suffice to say that the university is still dedicated to increase internationalization despite this not being without problems…What was discussed at the hearingThe part of the discussion that happened in English was circling around the PhD education. A very valid request was not to fix something that is not broken. In the international comparison, PhD education is for the most part excellent in Finland and the only perceived problem is its length.At the moment a Finnish PhD thesis in life science requires the graduate student to publish in scientific journals. As a consequence, most of the research in Finland is done by PhD students. The exact number and quality of publications required differs between faculties as there is no formal consensus. Typical are 3-5 papers, sharing of authorship is accepted to a certain degree. Not all publications need to be first-author contributions.Finish PhD graduates are competitiveWhile a PhD from a Finnish University is internationally very competitive, PhD graduates are typically much older than those from most other countries. This begs the question: so what? The typical length of PhD studies in Finland has been generally assumed to be around 7 years. However, nobody knows exactly (not even the university itself, since tight rules to register PhD studies have not existed until recently), but there seems to be a very slow movement towards a shorter duration (and less requirements). Strong forces act against shortening of PhD studiesThe fact that the PhD studies last so long in Finland is the result of natural selection. Pushing with regulation for faster PhD education will have many unintended consequences. There are strong forces acting against shortening the PhD studies, especially for highly talented students that aim at an academic career: E.g. the relative ease to get scholarship funding during the PhD studies and the high unemployment among fresh PhDs in Finland.Age limits for PhD degrees for fundingPointed out by Kalle Saksela, a major obstacle to shorting the PhD education is the general funding situation of academic research. With every funding cycle, funding rates are pushing new all time lows. Successful applicants have a very compelling portfolio of high quality publications, which needs time to acquire. However, major competitive research funding (Academy of Finland, ERC) puts limits on applicants (e.g. “no more than 7 years after PhD completion”), which have no relationship to the quality of the application.Four yearsThe very clear message from vice rector Hämäläinen (Jukka Kola had already left the discussion, when it switched from Finnish to English) was that the PhD studies must be shortened in order to reach comparability with other countries. The target is 3+2+4 (3 years for the Bachelor’s studies, 2 more years for the Master’s studies, and then 4 years for the PhD studies). The idea put forward by the vice rector was to simply move some of the studies that are done at the moment under the PhD umbrella into the early postdoctoral period. A big question is obviously who is going to pay for this move? There needs to be a substantial increase in research funding to be able to pay salaries for postdocs unless we want to lower the overall domestic research output. Already now it borders to financial suicide to employ a postdoc with an Academy Research Fellow budget.

Cyclical PhD production

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I was wondering why recently nobody graduated with a PhD from our lab. My first (and wrong) conclusion was, that our lab is not as productive anymore as it used to be. When I looked at the data carefully I discovered an interesting phenomenon: The PhD production rate in our lab follows a 5-6 year cycle. And lo and behold: The cycle is about to peak again in 2013/2014, which is exactly what I expect to happen as many of our PhD students are about to finnish this or next year. I wonder whether this is specific for Kari Alitalo’s lab or whether this a general phenomenon. In any case I am looking forward to all those parties (“karonkka”) that lie ahead.The figure above shows the number of PhDs received any given year that were supervised by Kari Alitalo averaged over a window of one or three years. Shared supervision was counted as 0.5.

Michael Jeltsch’s PhD thesis

Mon, 25 Nov 2002 00:00:00 +0000

My doctoral thesis has been published: Michael Jeltsch VEGFR-3 Ligands and Lymphangiogenesis, Helsinki 2002. The public defence will take place in Biomedicum, Helsinki, on November 29th, 2002.