Group items tagged

"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. "

"As a time management life coach, I've found that many of my clients have a dread of finishing that they keep hidden away-hoping that no one will ever notice that they get a lot of little things done while never quite completing the really important stuff. Whether it's due to a rabid perfectionism, an aversion to criticism, or just an inability to maintain enthusiasm for the long haul, we all have challenges and fears we must overcome to produce work that matters. But pretending they don't exist won't get us anywhere. Here's a guide to diagnosing and treating what I've found to be four of the most common barriers to completion:"

Ph.D. students are particularly prone to some of these behaviours, I think, so perhaps this will help someone.

Using Scrivener for academic writing, including how to use Scrivener to manage the literature review.

"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?

Can be interesting, complex, and experimental in themselves. Realities is part of the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods, based in the Morgan Centre for the Study of Relationships and Personal Live at the University of Manchester. Here we find out what Realities Toolkits are, and give links and abstracts for a small selection of the resources. Text taken directly from an email sent by the Morgan Centre, to the 'postgrad' academic JISC email list:

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!

"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.