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The publish-or-perish culture is destroying the quality of academic research (71)

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Growing 115 pts 0 followers
National Institute of Technology Karnataka · Posted
Environmental Science

The honest answer to 'is a PhD worth it in India in 2025'

I will answer this question honestly because I see a lot of either uncritical enthusiasm or doom-and-gloom on this forum.

A PhD is worth it if:

  • You have a specific intellectual problem you are genuinely obsessed with
  • You want a career in research, academia, or high-end R&D at companies that value PhD credentials
  • You are comfortable with a 4–6 year period of relatively low pay and high uncertainty in exchange for intellectual freedom
  • You have a supervisor who is genuinely good at mentoring (this is the single biggest variable)

A PhD is probably not worth it if:

  • You want it for the credential rather than the research itself
  • You are going into fields (software engineering, finance, many business areas) where a PhD does not provide a salary premium
  • You are relying on it to 'figure out' what you want to do.that is what a master's degree is for

The Indian academic job market is brutal. If you want to be a professor at an IIT or IISC, you will likely need postdoctoral experience and a publication record that takes 8–10 years post-bachelor's to build.

But if research is genuinely what you want to do.it is absolutely worth it.

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4 Replies

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Varsha Pillai Growing 60 pts · Accepted answer

For Zotero vs BibTeX management, I moved to Zotero + Better BibTeX 3 years ago and have not looked back.

My workflow:

  1. Zotero browser connector captures papers instantly from ArXiv, Google Scholar, ACM DL, IEEE Xplore
  2. Better BibTeX generates a clean .bib file that auto-updates whenever I add a paper
  3. Overleaf directly pulls from the .bib file via Dropbox sync

One tip: create a Zotero collection per paper/project. When you export the .bib, export only that collection to keep it clean.

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Replying to Varsha Pillai
Arjun Venkatesan Growing 195 pts · Accepted answer

This is exactly what I needed. Thank you so much.I have been going back and forth on this for weeks and this clears it up completely.

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Replying to Varsha Pillai
Asha Pillai Distinguished 880 pts · Accepted answer

This is exactly what I needed. Thank you so much.I have been going back and forth on this for weeks and this clears it up completely.

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Divya Krishnan Growing 85 pts · Accepted answer

This is really helpful context. One more question: for the ethics committee approval, does the institution where the data is collected or the institution where the analysis is performed need to be the primary ethics approver?