Towards a Socio-Technical Diagnostic Model for Doctoral Research Monitoring in Engineering and Management

Doctoral research monitoring in technical universities can be conceptualized as a socio-technical system in which research trajectories, supervisory practices, institutional rules, digital infrastructures, and assessment norms interact within a broader socioeconomic environment. This article develops a conceptual framework and a Provisional Diagnostic Model (PDM) for Engineering and Management through an integrative conceptual synthesis. The framework specifies system boundaries and hypothesized reinforcing, balancing, and metric-gaming feedback loops. The model separates institutional opportunity conditions from evidence of individual progress and engagement, and reports effective weights and evidence coverage alongside its aggregate score. It distinguishes research novelty from applied relevance through profile-specific contribution rules and introduces a separate, non-compensatory gate for novelty, research integrity, and methodological rigor. Fully specified synthetic examples demonstrate calculation, missing-data treatment, and parameter sensitivity. The framework is neither an empirically validated instrument nor a calibrated system-dynamics simulation. It provides an explicit conceptual specification for future testing and formative doctoral monitoring without treating resource access or output counts as sufficient evidence of research quality.