Effective research is not always published. There are volumes of private research in technical disciplines you will never hear about. There is not enough data a

Effective research is not always published. There are volumes of private research in technical disciplines you will never hear about. There is not enough data available for you to declare confidently that the PhD is a strong requirement for real research. Furthermore, especially in the field of computer science, you should really run the numbers on how many of ex. the 10 authors on each of the 100 Google papers put out each year had a PhD. Additionally, nothing has been done to separate the issue of correlation and causation. If research capable individuals pursue a PhD because it interests them, who's to say that their research capability came from the PhD versus it being intrinsic. One can learn a lot from a PhD. But saying that it's a practical requirement for research in this modern era of information access is without definitive evidence.