Our universities inspect research with great care. They rarely ask who is waiting for it.
Ask final-semester MPhil students who will read their theses, and I suspect you will get a pause. Their supervisor, they will say eventually, then two examiners, then a similarity checker of the electronic kind. After that, a second and longer pause, because they have run out of readers. Months of work, written for an audience that can be counted on one hand and disperses on the day of the viva. The students did not write it for those readers, exactly. But those readers are the only ones who were ever asked to read it.
I cannot prove that theses go unread. I have seen no data either way, and that absence is part of my argument. What I can describe is the architecture, and it is lopsided. We have built a great deal of machinery for the reader who judges, and almost none for the reader who uses: the person who borrows a finding, a method or a warning and does something differently on Monday morning.
The judging side is no trifle. As I read a copy of the Higher Education Commission’s policy on external examiners and publication that reached me, a PhD thesis needs at least two outside reviewers, and the candidate is expected to publish a first-author paper, which in the social sciences means a journal from the Commission’s own X or Y categories. The university policies I saw applied the publication condition to the doctorate alone. Then comes similarity checking: Turnitin’s guidance, as I understand it, extends the benefit of the doubt up to nineteen per cent overall and asks for a closer look when five per cent or more traces to one uncited source. All of it is sensible, and I would not delete a line. But notice the timing. It happens before the degree, every time. Each check asks something about the thesis (is it sound, is it original, is it clean?) and none asks where it is going.
Why should that be? Follow the incentives. The student leaves with a degree on the day of the defence. The examiner leaves with a signed report. The university leaves with one more graduate in its annual figures. A supervisor may turn the work into a paper, but out of loyalty to the subject, not out of obligation. Nobody in this chain is paid, promoted or praised for what happens to the thesis next. When no one’s interest depends on the reader who uses, we should hardly be surprised that this reader never turns up. That is design, not neglect. In the language of the market, nobody ordered the thesis; it was merely required, and a required thing is finished the moment it is accepted. I will add a suspicion, and label it as one: a student who knows the examiner is the last reader may choose the topic easiest to approve rather than the question most worth asking.
The bill for this is partly visible: months of a student’s labour, a supervisor’s hours, public money. The rest is quieter. Work nobody consults cannot be corrected, so its mistakes survive. It cannot be built upon, so the same question gets asked again from zero in another department. And a record of research that is never opened slowly stops being research and turns into paperwork.
Pakistan has at least built the shelf. The HEC’s Pakistan Research Repository keeps MPhil and PhD theses in digital form, more than nine thousand with full text, according to one description I found. But a shelf is not a readership. I looked for figures on how many of those files have been opened, cited, or turned into articles, and found none. If the numbers exist, they deserve to be published. If they do not, that tells us something too.
A fair objection: a thesis is training, not a product. The MPhil is an apprenticeship, and an apprentice’s first piece of work may be read by no one and still do its job. Granted. But universities rarely claim only that. They also present these theses as contributions to knowledge, and a contribution has to be received by somebody before it counts. We cannot invoice for both and audit neither.
So what would it take to put an address on the envelope? Four modest changes, each with its caveat.
First, publish the afterlife. Every university should report each year how many of its theses led to a paper, a book chapter or a policy note within three years, naming the quality of the outlet, since raw counts would flatter weak journals.
Second, write for the outsider as well. File a plain-language summary of about fifteen hundred words with every thesis, so that a teacher, an official or a reporter can actually use it. Sensitive data would need its own handling.
Third, start from a question somebody has. Let departments and local bodies list the problems they want answered, and draw a share of topics from that list. Keep the share modest, or curiosity-driven research gets squeezed.
Fourth, release the examiners’ reports alongside the thesis, with names removed, so the next reader learns where the work is strong and where it wobbles. Anonymity is essential here; without it, candour will fade.
I would begin with the first, because it needs no new law, only a directive from the HEC and a yearly return from each university. What the four share is simple: each makes someone answerable for the reader who uses.
My claim is easy to test. Show me university-wise figures proving that most theses are later put to work, and I will retract it gladly. If no such figures exist, we have at least learned that nobody ever thought to ask.
A thesis written only for its examiners is a letter posted without an address: stamped, inspected at every counter, delivered nowhere. Judging asks whether the work is good enough to pass. Using asks whether it was good for something. We have answered the first question thousands of times. It is time to begin asking the second.