Thanks to Prof. Jan Arlbjørn, University of Southern Denmark, for the first guest entry on our blog:
The 2007 Nordlog Doctoral Workshop was held in Reykjavik, Iceland, on June 6th prior to the 19th Annual Nofoma conference (June 7th and 8th). The theme on this year’s NORDLOG was: Getting published? – Making your work publishable
I had the pleasure to chair this workshop, and give a presentation on: Elements to consider before, during and after paper submission. In addition, Dr. Dimitrios Vafidis gave a presentation on: Choosing you researh approach. The discussion that emerged during the workshop was related to several issues of the publication process as well as the format of the final PhD dissertations. Here I would like to elaborate on one of the topics – what seems to be a major trend in the format of the final Ph.D. dissertation among Nordic doctoral students: The shift from writing and submitting a monograph (book) towards writing a collection of articles. A total of 37 doctoral students did attend the NORDLOG workshop, and about 80% of the attendances indicated they expect to do, or have already decided, to do a collection of articles instead of a monograph. I’m surprised. I can understand the motives for doctoral students to follow this strategy due to the increased publication pressure at universities and the appreciation of peer-reviewed journal articles. However, I would like to submit a point for this debate: Do we with this development get better PhD dissertations?
My fear is that the education process to earn the PhD degree will mirror the same fundamental characteristics of the rapid evolving requirements to publish, which could be argued to favor certain specific methodologies. Perhaps the results will be more predictable.
In the future, will we see challenging – thought provoking – dissertations?
Dissertations containing some high risk and challenging ideas?
Or will it rather be straight forward dissertations consisting of 4 to 5 publishable articles following the polite mainstream game of publishing?
Where are we heading?
Jan Arlbjørn
Chair of Nordlog 2007
– and the final call to set arrangements going directly to Iceland), then SAS kindly enough lets you pay for the service of changing your flight schedule. Is this what they call “good service”? (I wonder, was this before or after the re-launch?) Yes, SAS managed to distinguish between operational productivity and customer productivity, but might have missed out a point in 
