PhD supervisor

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

As a doctor father and doctor mother the care provider is unofficially one in Germany, Austria and Switzerland PhD students during the preparation of the thesis and in the promotion referred. International is the term promoter . In Austria, the terms are officially supervisor or supervisor common and statutory terminus.

person

The doctoral supervisor is usually a professor or a habilitated member of the relevant faculty and is responsible for carrying out the doctoral procedure in front of the faculty (including coordinating the organizational measures). Some doctoral regulations in Germany meanwhile also grant junior professors the right to independently supervise doctoral students or to provide an initial assessment of dissertations.

procedure

The supervisor suggests a topic for the dissertation or can accept a topic proposed by the doctoral student himself.

The scope of supervision by the doctoral supervisor is not standardized and in practice often depends heavily on the subject and the person concerned. In the experimental natural sciences, supervision can be very narrow, with daily to weekly discussions, in the humanities subjects it can consist of much less frequent discussions of progress, right up to - in the worst case - sole assessment of the completed dissertation.

Ideally, the relationship between doctoral supervisor and doctoral candidate is characterized by mutual trust; sometimes it is also characterized by a strong dependency with almost “ feudal ” traits, since the doctoral regulations are often quite vague with regard to the requirements and structure of the dissertation and this point is left to the agreements between the doctoral student and the supervisor.

In fact, the doctoral supervisor alone decides whether the content, quality, length of the work and the deadline meet his expectations. In principle, such specifications can be revised at any time without the doctoral student having any real possibility of objection. However, it is good academic practice that the supervisor treat his doctoral students fairly. The doctoral supervisor is also of crucial importance when it comes to giving grades. In some cases, he also requires the completion of work for his own research, administration or the like, which is not directly related to the dissertation. Such practices are rejected in many subjects by the majority of professors - who, after all, have all been in the role of doctoral students themselves.

Prestigious

Since dissertations must be published in Germany, the work as a doctoral supervisor also takes place in the specialist public. The scientific prestige of the doctoral supervisor results (in addition to his own scientific publications) from the number and quality of successfully completed doctoral theses. Dissertations that do not meet the scientific standards, however, also damage the reputation of the respective supervisor.

As a rule, the doctoral supervisor is therefore very interested in properly supervising doctoral students and bringing them to a successful degree, also in order to later attract new, motivated doctoral students.

The pronounced relationship of dependency can be abused by the doctoral supervisor in that doctoral students are forced to publish their own research results under the name of the doctoral supervisor or in co-authorship, which can inadmissibly increase the reputation of the doctoral supervisor and deny the actual author the corresponding gain in reputation .

family tree

Analogous to a family tree , an academic family tree represents the relationship between academic teachers and students (e.g. doctoral students). This enables “scientific schools” to be identified, which can often be traced back to well-known personalities who founded or shaped a science.

See also

Compare historically to the "respect for the teacher" and its economic importance also the oath of Hippocrates in the history of medicine .

literature

  • Robert Baring: How do I find a good and quick doctoral supervisor from a German university? Successful doctorate for economists, lawyers, scientists , engineers and humanities scholars , 2nd, revised edition, VDM Verlag Dr. Müller , Düsseldorf 2003, ISBN 3-936755-11-6 .
  • Siegfried Bär : Research in German. The Machiavelli for researchers and those who want to become one , 4., exp. and actual Ed., Thun [u. a.] 1993, ISBN 3-8171-1683-7 .
  • Alvin de Froncker: The Doctoral Project: Your career goal: The postgraduate doctorate , collection of topics with 10 scripts, IWP Institute for Postgraduate Doctoral Exploration and Academic Continuing Education, Wiesbaden, 1994, ISBN 978-3-930645-00-8 .
  • Rosemarie Schuder : “I know the devil!” Martin Luther and his doctoral supervisor Andreas Bodenstein from Karlstadt, Niederlausitzer Verlag, Guben 2016, ISBN 978-3-943331-37-0 .
  • Steffen Stock (Hrsg.): Doing a successful doctorate: a guide from doctoral candidates for doctoral candidates , Springer, Berlin a. a. 2006, ISBN 978-3-540-29671-3 .

Web links

Wiktionary: Doktorvater  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Section 59, Paragraph 1, Item 7 of the University Act .