Less Efficient, Rather Than More So

The question arises whether the Charité University Hospital is aiming to abolish first-class medical research. Its new regulations for doctoral degrees (from summer 2012) stipulate the publication-based doctorate, meaning that the doctoral candidate should be listed as the first author in an international journal with as high an impact factor as possible (which is rather dubious for individual researchers [2]). Doctoral candidates are academic beginners, and beginners’ work is not going to be first-class. Only when the doctoral candidate has a very good supervisor, usually a PD (“Privatdozent”, a university lecturer in German-speaking countries) or “almost PD,” first-class academic work might be the outcome. The problem is that people in such positions also require first authorships for a professorship or a PD (3, 4). If the first authorships will as a rule go to such supervisors’ doctoral candidates, then supervision won’t be possible, and the academic theses will as a result always come from unsupervised beginners. Instead of leading to greater efficiency, the Berlin approach will mean less efficiency.

DOI: 10.3238/arztebl.2012.0753b

PD Dr. med. Thomas Stief

Institut für Laboratoriumsmedizin und Pathobiochemie, Marburg
thstief@med.uni-marburg.de

Conflict of interest statement

The author declares that no conflict of interest exists.