THE ROLE OF THE PH.D. IN
A PROFESSIONAL FIELD
by Marcia J. Bates
Dept. of Information Studies
University of California, Los Angeles
Oct. 16, 1999
Copyright © 1999
by Marcia J. Bates
Questions regarding the role of the Ph.D. degree in our professional field arise, in my
experience, quite frequently and in a variety of environments. Among my academic
colleagues at the university, there seems to be an unwritten assumption, which sometimes
emerges in very explicit form, that the letters and sciences are not only the heart of the
university, but are also somehow on a higher plane than professional fields. Research in
those areas is "pure," in professions "applied," and, therefore, lesser.
On the other hand, among at least some library practitioners, one can find a quite
pronounced view that we who are teaching in professional programs are foggy-headed
researchers—hopelessly impractical, incapable of preparing our students for the real world
of practice. More specifically, our research is often seen to be so unconnected to real-world
situations that it can offer little of use to the working professional.
So what is it that we are doing when we get a doctorate in this profession? Doing "merely"
applied research, which our academic colleagues dismiss, while, on the other hand, the
practitioners view as so impractical that it is of no use anyway?
On the positive side, almost all universities recognize that researchers in professional fields
can earn the Ph.D., that is, a doctor of philosophy in a profession. In other words, they
recognize that even professions can do research that taps basic questions, and are not
only applied fields. By the way, in our field, there have only been one or two cases that I
know of where a School has both a DLS, or Doctor of Library Science, and a Ph.D. In most
places, even where the student earns a DLS, such as at the now-closed school at Columbia
University, the degree is understood to be a Ph.D., de facto. Only where both degrees exist
is a distinction is made between them.
So just what is the nature of a Ph.D. in a professional field—specifically, in this one? Let’s
look first at what a profession is. A profession develops a body of knowledge around roles
and activities that a society values. Professional skill then involves mastering that body of
knowledge and developing experience applying it to situations where the knowledge is
relevant.
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Professional knowledge is not algorithmic; that is, it does not involve following a
rule-based sequence of actions that are applicable in every common situation. Rather, a
profession always requires developed judgment. There are complexities, subtleties, and
variations from situation to situation that require experienced judgment in order to apply
the professional knowledge properly.
On the other hand, the knowledge a profession develops always has some application to
real situations in life. Knowledge developed in a research discipline may be abstruse and
complex, and certainly not algorithmic, but if it has no application to some identifiable real
situations, then it is, in the time-worn phrase, "purely academic," and not professional
knowledge.
Professions develop out of social need and out of social consciousness. In the nineteenth
century, when the size of library collections reached a point where older ad hoc and
idiosyncratic approaches would no longer suffice, standards, training, and a self-conscious
world view toward library and information services began developing. At the same time, a
conceptualization of the very idea of a profession was also ripening and maturing. Medicine,
teaching, nursing, the law had all been around for centuries, but their conscious
formulation as professions is a fairly recent development.
Indeed, there are many social forces shaping the modern idea of a profession, and our
profession in particular. But today, I want to concentrate on the question I started
with--what is the role of the Ph.D. in a professional field? And I want to address that
question with respect to the intellectual content of Ph.D.-level research and its relation to
the profession of library and information science--or, as it is becoming known, information
studies.
To cut to the chase, the fundamental point I want to make is that doctoral level research is
the seed-bed for ideas and practices of the profession. AND it achieves that role by doing
research that is as fundamental as any done in the letters and sciences.
I have argued elsewhere that information studies is fundamentally socio-technical. Our
professional functions are derived from social needs and circumstances, and, to be
successful, must serve to meet those needs. Information studies meets those social needs
by drawing on a wide range of intellectual and physical technologies. Achieving the
objectives of our profession depends on the skillful melding of an understanding of social,
political, economic, and psychological factors related to information needs and uses with a
mastery of both theoretical and practical issues in information organization and system
design.
There is something of a culture war going on these days between those in the field who
see the institution of the library and all it has meant to our society as the defining core of
our field and those who employ the concept of information to define the field. To the
"library" people, the information perspective is coldly technological and indifferent to
important social values and a rich history of service to a wide range of people, many of
whom were socially and economically enfranchised by the education they received at the
library. To these "library" partisans, the information perspective means pure computer
technology, carrying with it implicit authoritarian, even fascist, adoration of the power of
technology, to the detriment of precious human values.
I confess that I nonetheless come down on the "information" side of this argument, and
that, needless to say, I have a different perspective on the information view of our field.
Though I do not believe that most "information" partisans carry such an adoring view of
technology, to whatever extent they do, I side with the "library" partisans. Librarianship
has precious values of service to society, and I would like to see those values carry over to
any conceptualization of our field as information studies.
However o think the "information studies" approach is the right one for now in our field. To
many people, the term "information" is a cold and neutral one, and is limited in their minds
to pieces of data, like the population of Turkey or the distance to the sun. In this field,
however, we can and should use the term much more broadly, and apply it to all
experiences that can or do impact the human understanding and memory. Such a concept
is indisputably rooted then not only in the single mind, but also, necessarily, in human
society, as the mind is never wholly independent of the social matrix in which it was
nurtured and continues to act daily.
Some would then answer, well, in that case, "information" means everything--all
knowledge and experience. No one field can possibly encompass all of that. I agree, and I
don't make such a claim. We do address all of knowledge, but in a very particular way.
Information studies is a meta-field, like education or communication. Those fields, likewise,
deal with all knowledge, but each does something distinctive with that world of knowledge
and experience that is unique to each field.
Our field organizes information systems and services to offer that knowledge and
experience to information seekers, education shapes curricula and uses teaching skills to
convey that knowledge to learners, and communication/journalism uses reporting and
writing skills to convey discovered news to others. Each field holds a particular rhetorical
stance toward all knowledge, a stance that enables it to understand the human
relationship to information in its own distinctive way, and in service to a larger social
purpose that is unique to each field.
Once we see information studies in this manner, it becomes clear that the activities
traditionally engaged in by librarians in libraries bear many similarities to the activities of
archivists, of professionals in technical documentation, paper and electronic records,
digital databases and libraries, and so on. The shift to information studies is not, should not,
involve any rejection of libraries or librarianship; rather it should broaden our perspective
to all the contexts within which these meta-field activities take place.
However this debate in the field over our fundamental world view and philosophy is
resolved, the fact that there are such debates in the first place should provide a clue to the
depth of thinking and theory that lies at the heart of our work. In truly algorithmic work,
such as that of a restaurant cashier, it is doubtful that there are raging debates about the
philosophy of cashiering.
I would like now to provide an extended example of how our work draws upon, and needs
to draw upon, research that is as fundamental as any in the letters and sciences. The
example involves the design of information retrieval systems. Now, surely this is at the
technical, applied end of the business if anything is, right? Well, let's see.
Over the last two or three years I have come to see that the design of information systems
is vastly more complex than it was in the early days of automated information systems.
Early online database systems were crude and clunky. We didn't mind, however, because it
was so exciting that we could search online for information in real time. People mastered
arcane techniques and worked around the limitations of these systems as they needed to.
By now, however, the vast storage capabilities, sophisticated computer programming
languages, the varieties of search engines, the speed of networks, and the subtlety of
database design have all opened up a vast array of new design possibilities and
complexities. Furthermore, these technical elements I've mentioned by no means exhaust
the design elements that must be taken into consideration in creating the contemporary
information system. The selection of the information content itself, of systems of metadata
and indexing, design of search capabilities, selection or design of various kinds of access
front-ends, as well as interface design, must all go into the design of an automated
information system.
However, there remain still two more huge factors in this system design that are essential
to its success. First, the needs and characteristics of anticipated users of the system must
be taken into account with respect to every decision made on each of these technical and
informational elements. Second, all the design elements or layers need to be taken into
account simultaneously and in relation to each other.
Still, however, despite the complexity, all this might still be viewed by some as a merely
technical or applied problem--inviting the conventional dismissal. Now, in fact, design of all
kinds, including information system design, requires as much creativity and originality as
anything—but that’s another speech. Here, I want to address the more conventional,
recognized forms of academic research.
So let us look deeper. To make the following points, I am drawing on an extensive study
done by the Getty Information Institute, which I participated in and wrote six articles about.
In the study, Visiting Scholars in the humanities at the Getty were given the opportunity to
be trained to search databases provided by the vendor DIALOG, and then do as much
searching as they wished, for free, during their year as Visiting Scholars. In exchange, they
would participate in interviews and agree to have their entire searches recorded
automatically by computer.
In such a case, when we examine the users' needs, that examination must be conducted
as the very subtlest of original, basic social science research. To design an information
system that people will actually use, we must understand, in a profound way, how people
use and relate to the information in their domains of interest. In this case, we were dealing
with humanities scholars who had had, sometimes, decades in which to develop research
styles and in which to shape their perspectives on the world of recorded information that
they dealt with so intensively as scholars.
Here is where the term "information" must be used in the broader and deeper sense I was
arguing for earlier. In particular, in the Getty study it became clear to me that we could not
understand how the scholars used their searching opportunity, and could not suggest
features needed for them in information systems, without understanding something of the
entire social and educational system of practices and values within which they operated.
This is not simply a matter of gathering statistics on what percentage of the scholars’
resources were books, what percentage journals, and the like.
Rather, it involved developing a deep and subtle understanding of the culture of
humanities scholarship. It was necessary to understand how the scholars conceptualized
their research intellectually, and how they conceptualized the process of going about
locating and using research materials. It became clear that many assumptions in
information science about methods of research and desirable system design characteristics
were rooted in the research practices of the sciences and were inapplicable to the
humanities.
For example:
• We learned that the selection of resources for the typical database—with a heavy
emphasis on current journal articles—was much less useful for the scholars than for
scientists. Currency is very important in the sciences, while historical range is more
important in the humanities. This may seem obvious, but this basic reality was seldom
understood and acted upon by the database producers, who were creating products on the
science model.
• Second, fundamental differences in the way scholars conduct research and in how they
attempt to find new information require at least a partial reconceptualization of information
retrieval. Again, the paradigm of information retrieval research has been based on the
science model. Some of the basics of that model do not make sense for the humanities
scholar.
One such assumption is that the user of an information system is unfamiliar with the
majority of the records in the system relating to their topic of interest. We found, however,
for reasons that are based in the way scholars see their own relationship to their literature,
compared to the way that scientists do, that humanities scholars almost always knew most
of the literature in their field already. Thus, they saw their task as scholars to be to achieve
mastery of a large number of particular works by other scholars.
For scientists, on the other hand, knowledge of particular publications is of less interest
than knowledge of work going on in other laboratories. Scientific researchers on the
cutting edge will know of discoveries long before they reach print in any form—thus the
print version generally serves only an archival function.
In humanities scholarship, the particular insights achieved by the scholar are so important
that the texts of publications must be read closely and absorbed, then reread. I am
generalizing, of course, but there were nonetheless marked trends that can be seen to
distinguish the two groups of researchers. Most of the time, for scholars, a database
search functioned only as a way to catch any stray materials they were not already familiar
with. If such is the typical situation of the humanities information system user, then we
may need to design information systems in ingenious new ways that the science model did
not suggest. The fourth and fifth reports in the Getty series explain these points in more
detail, and suggest further design implications.
• Third, we found that the nature of humanities queries differed from those in the sciences
not only in the obvious respect of content, but also in conceptual structure. I have argued
that one consequence of this systematic difference is that humanities materials should
probably be indexed by faceted vocabularies, not by conventional alphabetical thesauri in
the scientific model. Furthermore, given this presumptive mode of indexing, then
information system search capabilities and interface characteristics should be designed
quite differently to accommodate these inherent information and system differences.
In fact, virtually every layer in the information system design would be affected
dramatically if these fundamental social characteristics of humanities research and
researchers were taken into account.
I’ve described social factors that go very deep into the information seeking and using
behavior of humanities scholars. Along the same lines, we could describe ergonomic,
psychological, and perceptual characteristics of people that must be taken into account for
system design, based on basic research in the cognitive sciences. Further, we could
identify—and this is unique to the information sciences—social, statistical, and economic
characteristics of the humanities literatures themselves that need to be understood to
optimize information system design.
If we think of the natural sciences as studying the physical world as their universe, the
social sciences studying the social world, and the arts and humanities studying the creative
products of human beings, then we can think of the information sciences as taking the
universe of recorded information—and human beings’ interactions with it—as our domain
of study. It is uniquely our challenge to identify the statistical, social, economic, and design
properties of the world of recorded information.
At every point, research results of basic research must be drawn upon to create optimal
information systems. Frequently, the only people doing the kind of basic research we need
in this field, are people in the field.
I could make analogous arguments about the need for basic research as a grounding to
developing information policies, or to developing the best institutional bases for
information services. In other words, in every area, this profession must draw on original,
basic research to achieve the best professional service.
This brings us to the other problem I mentioned earlier, however. If those of us with
Ph.D.’s in information studies are busy doing basic research, or developing experimental
systems and services that draw on basic research, how does this effort affect the working
practitioner? There have been many lamentations, at conferences and in print, that
researchers keep doing things that the practitioner cannot directly make use of. Is the
availability of the Ph.D. degree creating a group of irrelevant people producing results no
one will use?
The first thing we need to understand in relation to this question is that this is a
near-universal problem, not one specific to our field. It is a problem in the letters and
sciences and a problem in the professions. The bench chemist in a pharmaceutical firm no
more uses the latest chemistry results, as a rule, than the working librarian applies the
latest results published in Library Quarterly or the Journal of the American Society for
Information Science.
The problem arises for reasons very similar to the ones mentioned earlier regarding the
differences between scholars and scientists. Scholars and scientists have different cultures,
values, and ways of operating because the nature of their work demands it. The same
holds true for researchers and practitioners. Different native talents, training, and
experience all add up to create people—professors and practitioners--who work and
produce differently, and have different cultures and outlooks. Distinct types of minds and
personalities will be drawn to these distinct activities.
I have spent just two years as a manager—as the Chair of my Department. And at the end
of the two years I was a walking nervous breakdown. I have boundless admiration for
Dean Robbins and other academic leaders who skillfully navigate the dangerous waters of
large egos, small budgets, and killer work schedules. People who have a good
understanding of research, and who are simultaneously good at the practice of academic
management are rare, and universities are perennially, and often vainly, hunting for them.
It is in the nature of basic research that it often does not have immediate applications. But
even where there are immediate applications, the work produced by the researcher often
cannot be translated readily by the practitioner into practice. At this point the criticisms
arise.
It needs to be understood by all involved that the ability to translate between different
intellectual and practice cultures is a very special talent, and not all that common in any
field. Most researchers cannot do it and most practitioners cannot. Those who can, should
be treasured.
Unfortunately, the rewards are few to the people who engage in this translation process.
The librarian is unlikely to have the time to devote to the extensive literature review and
analysis needed to prepare a research-into-practice article—and may not have the
research training to understand all the literature. The researcher, on the other hand, gets
scant recognition or merit raises for producing what are generally dismissed as "service
publications." Consequently, those of us in academia seldom write such
boundary-spanning works.
To sum up, I believe that the Ph.D. in a profession is viewed as impure or applied precisely
because it must hold a broader view of its subject matter. The holder of a Ph.D. in a
professional field must be able to do basic research AND select research questions that
may contribute—if not this century then the next—to the practice of that socially useful
activity that is a profession. I’m hinting here that doing good research in the professions
may actually require more talent than the work in the traditional disciplines. At the very
least, it requires a considerable breadth of vision, a flexibility, and an ability to see
connections others may miss.
Few are the researchers who can take it still a step further and extract implications for
practice, and present those implications in a way that practitioners can make immediate
use of. That is quite a challenge. Where that ability does exist, however, it deserves to be
richly rewarded.