A Commentary on the Student-Supervisor Relationship: a Shared Journey of Discovery

Abstract

This article focuses on the student-supervisor relationship. Specifically, the increasingly strong focus on the impact factors of journals and other so called key performance indicators (KPIs), such as h-indices, and number of article downloads can serve to undermine a student’s genuine interest in a research area and leave little else behind but a strong focus on the level of KPIs that need to be achieved by the end of the PhD. And yet, other external pressures have also entered the mix, such as the Open Science Framework (OSF), on foot of the so called replication crisis. This is not the place to work through the potential costs and benefits of these more recent developments in academic life, but the apotheosis of the KPI and the unquestioning acceptance of the OSF, all of which seem so reasonable at first blush, have the potential to impact on academic life in perhaps unexpectedly negative ways. One such consequence is that the student-supervisor relationship may be twisted and distorted into one in which a student simple sees the supervisor as the 'best bet' for increasing their KPIs by the end of the PhD, with the student having little or no interest in actually learning how to acquire a full and rounded set of research skills because existing data sets may be re-analyzed courtesy of the OSF. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved)