Crediting curiosity and creativity in young scientists: Beyond the standard publication record ….

Abstract

Andrew Moore Editor-in-Chief I would argue that PhD students need a system of accreditation of creativity in the absence of publication such that their development of curiosity can be actively fostered at this crucial time in their career. To create an environment in which it is “safe” to place a little more emphasis on free thinking and exploration rather than standard production of results, it would be useful to have a system that recognizes what I refer to as “creatively-obtained negative results”. Some PhD students call them “Friday afternoon experiments”; others talk more generally about the need to have some freedom to explore. These days it's a hard job to reconcile the necessity − in many countries − to publish papers in order to obtain a PhD. What is the result? Well, knowing that across all PhD students in the world a vast variety of different types of paper are published, all we can say is that the result of such conditions is a PhD student with publications − regardless of their quality in terms of scientific thought. What is even more important, however, for the development of vibrant research is a PhD student whose curiosity has been developed. I'll venture a comparison here: the support of curiosity in PhD students is, on average, as likely to produce good research as the support of basic research is likely to produce outcomes of applied value. Analysts of research generally come to the latter conclusion, and politicians are constantly urged to support basic research on those grounds: on average, the research most likely to produce the greatest applied value is the research with the greatest unknowns. Similarly, I believe that PhD research projects that permit the greatest freedom to explore (opportunity for curiosity) are likely to be the ones with the potential to produce the most interesting results, and − equally importantly − culture the best scientific minds. Thomas Kuhn (in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions) recognized that two types of science − i.e. “normal” and “extraordinary/revolutionary” − are necessary for overall progress. However, revolutionary research arguably needs more conceptual attention, particularly in young scientists: that is because nurturing creativity and curiosity in the young is bound to have greater effect in terms of the development of associated scientific skills than nurturing it later. In fact, not many group leaders will find it appropriate to nurture curiosity actively even in a first post-doc, so practically-speaking there is no later opportunity in the scientific career for curiosity-nurturing than during a PhD. Paradoxically − given the largely absent culturing of curiosity during a PhD − the degree of autonomy that is expected of researchers increases through PhD and post-docs: and that autonomy certainly refers to creative scientific thinking − a quality that is nurtured by permitting curiosity. But what if, during your PhD, your supervisor has given you a good deal of free line, you've done some really first-class thinking and experiments, and all you have is negative or inconclusive results? At present you can't do much with creativity and curiosity that don't lead to publication in a recognized journal. But what if there were a PhD repository where you could upload such research, and independent authorities in the field could be invited to judge it? This could even be conceived as a standard part of the PhD examination. More importantly, it could be an extremely valuable way of more fairly judging PhD students who appear to “succeed” by producing a lot of “normal”, publishable, research, against those who appear to “fail”, but with “creatively-obtained negative results”. Andrew Moore Editor-in-Chief