GENESIS: Internationally, the importance of the doctorates has been growing continuously. This increasing attention has not only been predominantly concerned with the traditional role as future supply of academicians but also focused on the increasingly important role in the knowledge economy, especially with regard to high-level skills.

More and more universities around the world graduate ever increasing number of students with Ph.Ds. A new study notes that China is the world leader in producing Ph.Ds, having outnumbered the United States on a per year basis. Doubts are raised that the sharp increase of Ph.D. awardees may be compromised at the cost of quality.

Every year on an average about 0.4 million Ph.Ds are produced globally in which India’s share is merely 10% (about 40000) whereas China and USA contribute to about 25% doctorates; more often, the quality of Ph.D. research work is questionable.

It was felt that a global platform of doctorates should be established to share the experiences in generation and dissemination of knowledge and also to network for ensuring high quality in doctoral research. In pursuance with this objective, on March 7, 2012, a distinguished group called “Global Network of Doctorates” (GND) was created by Prof. Dr. Kamal Kant Dwivedi on LinkedIn, which has so far been joined by more than 5840 highly accomplished professionals from 55 countries. These members have doctorate degrees in different fields of study and they were engaged in hundreds of discussions, opinion polls and thousands of comments/ suggestions to improve quality of research.

The link to visit the group is: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/4341924/

Global Network of Doctorates also declared that 25^th August every year shall be observed as the “World Doctorates Day” and on this day various academic institutions be encouraged to organise conferences/ seminars/ workshops/lecture series etc. and take a pledge. On August 25, 2013 we organised a conference at Apeejay Stya University, Gurugram and at Jamia Milia Islamia University, New Delhi. In 2014, this event was organized at India International Centre, New Delhi. In 2015 this event was organised by Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi. During the last 7 years the event was organised at ITM University Gwalior (2016), JNU, New Delhi (2017) NIAS and Christ University, Bengaluru (2018), Goa University, Goa (2019) and ITM University Gwalior (2020), Amity University Haryana (2021) and Amity University, Rajasthan Jaipur (2022).

This year, to commemorate 'World Doctorates Day', Amity University Lucknow Campus under the aegis of Global Academy of Doctorates is organising one-day “International Conference on Issues and Challenges in Doctoral Research (ICICDR 2023)” in physical mode. Invitations are being sent to thousands of doctorates across the world including a few eminent academicians and corporate executives for their gracious presence. We hope that about 4000 doctorates will participate in this event.