I wasn’t even sure of how to tag this sorry list of quackademic inanities… These “projects” actually receive money, and sometimes quite a lot of it… Just a few examples:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10894160.2025.2473971
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17539153.2023.2188680
Just reading the titles of the papers induces absolute despair in me…the Academy is dead!
it’s revolting, Machaire… I spent almost 5 years writing my PhD and I feel completely betrayed by the system and by the absolute perversion of all this…
oh wait, this last paper - the PDF one - was done as a joke but it passed the peer-review process anyway…
I would guess that little slice of knowledge previously unknown that a PhD candidate is supposed to reveal can be made up since we didn’t know it existed.
… there are always two problems in such an endeavor 1) finding the gap in the literature and 2) a truly novel idea for exploring or explicating it. The second is usually the most difficult.
What you need to do - or what I tried to do, at least - is to first carefully design your investigation. Then follow the research wherever it leads you within that framework and achieve something that is noteworthy. Finally, concisely explain why the investigation took that path and carefully justify WHY you came into those conclusions and why exactly they are relevant for the field.
Otherwise it would be just be coming up with some sort of novelty. Having said that, you are right that given the current sorry state of Academia, any sort of current fad is fair game.
I sincerely hope that I did something more honest. And I know that a lot of people are still taking their research as something sincere and noteworthy.