Group items tagged

"Editors of journals suggest that one of the major problems they see in submitted articles is a lack of focus. They observe that too many writers try to say 'everything', and this means that they end up saying 'nothing'." Common problems with journal papers related to lack of focus are described. How many are you guilty of?

open access journal with articles around transdisciplinarity, systems, complexity, etc.

The nature and structure of scientific theories, Moulines, 2010

Thanks for posting this Heather, I found it useful in clarifying what is/isnt theory, and differentiating between theories that get referred to as weak or strong

[Article] Feudalism & academia: UK academics' accounts of research culture http://is.gd/k72Ae (Int J Qual Studies in Education) #KM $

I found some of these points quite challenging, but also made me think about what I am actually doing and what I need to do. There is another article somewhere "A PhD is not a nobel prize" also worth reading to remind of scope of graduate research.

Why the value of a PhD is much more than the salary you earn at the end of it!

I completely agree with this article - if you're doing a PhD just to get a bigger salary at the end of it then you're probably doing it for the wrong reasons!

I think the value of a PhD is "personal growth" and improvement (no matter how slushy that sounds). For me that's been the most noticeable thing and by far the best. Bex, I agree - I doubt the financial rewards (if any) would keep me going!

"I recently boiled down some of the advice I try to give students about how to carry out searches and formulate research questions, which I'll reproduce here. I start with the basic insight that I've picked up from Swarthmore's library staff, that the point where many students struggle in research is not with finding credible or authoritative sources once they've settled on a topic but with understanding what is researchable or knowable within the constraints of the assignment, the resources, the disciplinary framework and so on. I feel as if too many of my colleagues are still focused on the former issue rather than the latter one, still too worried that students aren't finding the "right" sources that have scholarly legitimacy in favor of Wikipedia or whatever they can find on as full-text at 2 a.m. I don't think this is a big issue both because I have a much higher opinion of Wikipedia and such than many of my colleagues and because I find that students actually have fairly good skills for finding properly authoritative sources and material. As long as they've gotten the research framed correctly at the outset, that is. So what I focus on is processes of discovery that students should use to find out what's known and knowable, how researchable a particular question is, what the shape or character of information about that question looks like, and how to make smart decisions about where to invest labor and time in developing a research assignment. "

"So, my lessons for the year: You can't read everything You already know a lot Your ideas are interesting Research is fun Collaboration is a very, very good thing. Not bad for one year."

Lessons a Ph.D. student learned in their first year. Good read and good advice too.

Links to lots of stuff Becker has written, etc.