early onset satisfaction – this is a notion that I once heard Mem Fox talking about. She put EOS as the enemy of all writers. Feeling too happy with a piece of writing meant that you didn’t rewrite and rewrite as often and as hard as you ought to.

I had cause to think about early onset satisfaction again last week as I was reviewing an article which had clearly been sent in to the journal far too soon.

It was one of those articles about a single aspect of a very small study about something not very important… and I confess I wondered if the paper was so slight because the writer was trying to get more than one paper out of it. There was probably one passable paper in the whole study I suspected, but certainly not enough in the one I had to review.

I doubted very much if the author had given the paper to anyone else to read. And if they had, I’d have taken bets that they hadn’t asked anyone to ask them the hard questions – like – So what, and Why should I care?

When I remembered Mem’s phrase, I wondered whether perhaps that was what had happened. The writer had been struck down with EOS. They were so pleased to have written the thing, so darn satisfied, that they’d just sent it off. (No, my referee comments weren’t cruel. Yes, I didn’t feel nice, but I was as nice as I could manage.)

Now Mem is not the only one to suggest that it is dangerous for writers to be satisfied too soon with their work. I recently noticed that Rose Tremain had expressed a similar sentiment in her 10 rules for writers. She offers Never be satisfied with a first draft. In fact, never be satisfied with your own stuff at all, until you’re certain it’s as good as your finite powers can enable it to be.

Will Self says You know that sickening feeling of inadequacy and over-exposure you feel when you look upon your own empurpled prose? Relax into the awareness that this ghastly sensation will never, ever leave you, no matter how successful and publicly lauded you become. It is intrinsic to the real business of writing and should be cherished.

Zadie Smith says Leave a decent space of time between writing something and editing it.

Roddy Doyle advises Do be kind to yourself. Fill pages as quickly as possible; double space, or write on every second line. Regard every new page as a small triumph ­– until you get to Page 50. Then calm down, and start worrying about the quality. Do feel anxiety – it’s the job.

We get the picture. Real writers don’t get too satisfied too soon. They don’t suffer from EOS.

These same writer’s maxims are also true for academic writing. Even though academics are in a publication churn, it is still really helpful not to rush papers off as soon as the printer ink is dry. It’s good to let a paper sit and percolate on its own for a while, after you’ve had the first couple of goes at it. Have a break, come back to it later and see how it stacks up.

It’s also really useful to pass a paper around among some trusted friends to get some feedback. Ask the readers not to be nice, but to be helpful. You don’t have to take their advice, and they might just come up with things that are really important. Tell them to ask you the So what question.

No matter how tempting it is to just send the paper off, it’s MUCH better to take that extra time because it may well be the difference between rejections and small revisions. Premature publication is risky and bad for the mental health. Let “cant get no satisfaction” be the mantra.

Co-writing is common in lab teams. Most science researchers working in research groups expect that they will co-write with others. Indeed, it also seems to be mainly lab teams that produce the horror stories of plagiarism and not giving due credit. Well, there is just much more co-writing going on, and some of it is pretty high-stakes, we mustn’t assume any in-built disciplinary evil. Co-writing is less common in the humanities and social sciences. It is, however, becoming more usual – not only because of the PhD by publication, but also because supervisors are taking up co-writing as part of their supervision practice.

I’m sure that the horror stories are true and I’m sure that there are some unscrupulous people out there. But the majority of supervisors aren’t out to rip off the doctoral researchers they work with. So, if we don’t take corruption and unethical behaviour as the starting point, then what IS the answer to the question of whether doctoral researchers should co-write with their supervisors?

The usual reasons against co-writing – I found these by doing the inevitable bit of google searching – were:
(1) the doctoral researcher is the expert in the research not the supervisor and they should therefore just write by themselves
(2) the supervisor is getting a free publication on the doctoral researcher’s back
(3) hiring committees look askance at articles co written with supervisors and discount them.

There’s actually not a lot of knowledge about the last point. When I found mention of this, I googled around a bit more to see if there was any discussion about hiring committees and I did find a tiny bit. One suggestion was that if the hiring committee saw a co-written article, then they assumed that this was because the supervisor thought highly enough of the doctoral researcher and their work to want to write with them. Another comment was that if there was ONLY one co-written article then this could be seen as an indicator of poor productivity. I don’t know the answer to this, and it’d be interesting to do a bit of systematic re-searching to find out.

BUT, what if we reverse the question. Why should supervisors co-write with the researchers they work with?

The answer now seems to be either that supervisors are in it for a free publication – that’s the mean and nasty version – or that they co-write in order to help doctoral researchers learn the genre of the journal article and to help them get the work out there as soon as possible. If the latter helping is more generally true than the former self-interest, then we can see that while the doctoral researcher does absolutely contribute their research expertise, the supervisor also contributes by way of knowledge about academic writing.

So to go back to the original question then, why co –write with supervisors?

My answer is that doctoral researchers might want to co-write with their supervisors in order to learn the publication game. There’s also some safety in writing with a more experienced writing partner. The doctoral researcher ought to be able to rely on their supervisor to avoid the most obvious writing ‘mistakes – no focus, lack of signposting, too much literature, not enough methods, no conclusion, too much jargon. They also might learn how to get the right authoritative stance.

Of course there is always the vexed question of author order, but that’s a topic for another post.

For now, what do you think about co-writing? If a doctoral researcher, do you write with your supervisor? Would you? Or would you avoid it like the plague? If a supervisor, do you do this, why and how?

It’s not that I don’t do it. I do.

Well you have to now in HE. CVs and bio notes and university home pages are the bottom line for all of us. But there are of course multiple additional platforms across which you can re/present an academic self – facebook, tumblr, twitter, Wikipedia, pinterest etc. A new possibility nearly every month.

I do seem to rather relentlessly plug blog posts on twitter, probably much too much. On the other hand a friend who keeps an eye on such things was recently surprised to hear that my book with Barbara Kamler on publishing in academic journals had been out for some months ( read a review here). It had clearly passed her by and I obviously did a pretty crap job of promoting it. If your friends don’t know when you’ve published something, you’re in trouble! (Ive tried to compensate with these links!)

I confess that there are aspects of this self-packaging stuff which make me uncomfortable. It all seems a bit blowing your own trumpet very loudly and often… a lot like spin… more like self advertising for the sake of it…

But hang on… How culturally, generationally, and gender loaded is my reticence, I ask myself.
– generationally – I’ve not had to sell my soul or my self to get a job
- culturally – Australians, despite the reputation for being brash, tend to look disparagingly on self promoting tall poppies and England appears to be even more so
- gender – well I’m pretty ancient, and it was a case of girls being brought up not to put themselves forward. ‘Clever girls’ in particular were always regarded with some suspicion.
So there is probably a good sociological explanation for why I feel the way that I do about the self packaging game.

All well and good. Aside from considerations about the source of my discomfort about self promotion, I do also wonder about where you draw the line. On what basis do you decide something is OK, and something is too much?

I couldn’t name anything after myself. And I ‘m pretty sure I couldn’t write a Wikipedia entry about myself, although I know that some colleagues who have done both of these things. I might get round to doing a Wikipedia entry on something that I’ve researched – perhaps. Same for facebook – I could just about manage a research focused facebook page I think, but really I use FB just to connect with friends I don’t see in person very often.

However, I do get pretty miffed when I discover a book/Wikipedia/blog about something that I’ve been heavily involved with that doesn’t mention me – although I don’t make the effort to provide a correction. So there’s a contradiction for you. I want the credit, but I don’t want to have to do it myself.

Clearly it’s almost impossible to separate out the scholar from the scholarly work, and that’s what makes this whole topic of self packaging so interesting – and fraught. Promote the work and you promote the scholar – but is it always true vice-versa? Are there academic star cultures/academic cults of personality – and how does self packaging feed into them and are they a Bad Thing?

I’m not at all sure where I stand on all this and where to draw any new lines about what to do and what not to do… What do you think?

Now in the arts and social sciences this really isn’t a big problem. The doctorate is not seen as the place for enormous breakthroughs. It is more a case that the PhD is intended to demonstrate that the researcher can think their way through a problem, design a defensible and interesting research project, carry it out thoroughly, and write it into a coherent form. Even if the topic is one which is widely studied, the researcher brings their own particular readings of the literatures – and if they are doing empirical work they also bring the particular site, sample and method – to the study. These are what makes another look at a very well trodden area ‘the contribution’.

But even if the magic says-it-all article does appear it is still possible to incorporate it into the thesis, with a note to say that it wasn’t available at the time the research was designed. Sometimes this even appears as a post script. PhD examiners understand that this happens, and they are really not expecting to see the equivalent of a Nobel prize winning piece of work.

In reality there are very few of us who don’t work in fields where there are lots of other people slogging away just like we are, and the chances of someone else doing something pretty similar are relatively high. Very few of us find the unknown manuscript, or develop the killer app. Rather than see this as a problem, finding someone in or around the same question ought to be an opportunity for pleasure – there is someone we don’t know who we can potentially talk to, maybe even work up a collaboration.

The problem of someone else doing the same work changes for post doctorate researchers. While arts and social science scholars do not generally wake up in a cold sweat thinking that someone else has found the key to the universe or the cure for cancer before we have, there are still a couple of potentially nightmarish issues.

Doing the same work as someone else is an issue when it comes to publication. I recently encountered someone who was just about to write an article about a neglected form of poetry. But when she got the contents list of a newly released book in her field she saw there was a chapter addressing the very set of literatures she was also working on. What’s more the chapter appeared to be arguing the same thing she had intended – that this was an interesting set of texts which offered new insights into understandings of the period. Catastrophe!

Now this really was depressing – but not for long, as it turned out. The researcher was able to take this chapter as already written and it became a building block to which she could add. Despite her initial alarm, she was quite quickly able to find another angle on the texts. This allowed her to write a different article to the one she had first intended – but it was one which did make a further contribution to the emergent area.

Not everyone is so lucky as to find a new way to write about the shared topic, of course. People who are working in densely populated scholarly areas often have to work pretty hard to get something new to say. It can be quite tricky to turn a perfectly acceptable research project, which ends up coming to a fairly standard conclusion, into something interesting. Such projects could have a real impact on policy and/or practice, but require more imaginative work to get taken up by a journal.

The other being-in-the-same-place nighttime terror comes from the funding game. Some research councils believe that having different approaches to the same topic is potentially useful. Others however do not like funding more than one project on the same topic. It is a dreadful experience to spend ages on a bid for funding to then discover that someone down the road has put in something terribly similar on the same topic. The research council probably won’t fund both and will make a decision based on some kind of fine discriminator.

It is always important for those engaged in the bidding game to search through funded project archives to see what has already been done and reported, and what is underway, so at least avoiding the been-there-done-that funder response. It also helps to find out from someone in the know the council’s ‘hidden’ rules about double-funding. And of course it’s crucial to be well networked enough to know who is planning to do what – joint proposals are always possible.

Do you have any more angles on the researching–what’s-already-been-done issue? Do you agree that it’s not necessarily a problem, particularly at doctoral level? Got any stories to share?

As an academic who just squeezes into the definition of “early career” in a School of Education, the series of posts by Pat Thomson and Katie Wheat about the merits of theses by publication against the “big book thesis” caused me to reflect on my experience of being both a candidate and a supervisor, how much I have learnt and how much more I have to learn.

The point I would like to make in this post is that there is an upside to the big book thesis.

I wrote the traditional monograph. Subsequent to it being passed, it yielded a couple of conference papers, a couple of journal articles and was published as a book. It also landed me a job as an academic in a university.

Now, I do not claim to be an expert on either thesis modes, nor am I attempting to argue that one mode of thesis is better than another. They both have advantages and disadvantages.

I have found that the preparation of doing the big book thesis has served me well in my early career in academia. Of course, this is offset by the acknowledgement that the majority of PhD candidates no longer find tenured jobs in the academy. Whether people feel well-served by the big book thesis if they do not enter academia is a moot point.

However, in an environment where there is an increased interest in thesis by publication, particularly as universities become subject to various research metrics and rankings measuring outputs and their quality, I am aware of more examples of candidates undertaking thesis by publication where emphasis is placed on the outputs.

This leads me to wonder whether this movement to outputs pays enough attention to, or values enough, that moment when a candidate realises that they can equal, or have surpassed, the expertise of their supervisor in the area of their study.

It is a rich and powerful moment, and one to be celebrated. I still remember that moment in my candidature when, whilst discussing a complex theoretical point, I realised that I was engaging as an equal, rather than as a subordinate. That I ‘knew my stuff’ and could argue beyond the limits of the project on which I was engaged. That I was ready to engage in academic debate with others, and had something that was worthwhile and important to contribute.

Now, when I supervise PhD candidates, I explain this as a critical part of their journey, and a moment that I am both trying to cultivate and will welcome when it happens. It happens at different times, rarely early, but hopefully before the end of the thesis process.

I wonder if this is made more or less likely by the mode of thesis that a candidate undertakes? In other words, is the big book thesis better at facilitating that process? I doubt that if I had been focused on outputs this moment would have been as important or significant, or maybe as likely. As somebody who has seen and experienced the best and the worst of the peer review process, I also doubt that we can rely on reviewers who cannot know they are giving feedback to a candidate or a full professor to fulfil this function.

I have no answers to these questions – the limits of my experience prevent a more developed picture. But I would value your perspectives and experiences. We talk a lot about imposter syndrome – is it more or less likely in the big book or publication thesis?

I think these are important considerations that have practical consequences.

At the end of 2011 I was awarded an ARC Discovery Early Career Research Award. As part of its co-contribution, my university offered a PhD scholarship to work on the project. This placed me in a dilemma – in some ways it would have been easier to offer it by publication. In the ARC model, Investigators commit to outputs including the number of articles they will publish throughout the grant. Having a PhD student producing their thesis by publication, with the supervisor as a co-author, would count as outputs.

But I thought it would be worthwhile to canvas some more experienced colleagues and talk to some candidates about their perceptions. Should the scholarship be for a thesis by publication or by monograph?

From the anecdotal perspectives of supervisors and candidates, there are merits and problems with each of the modes of thesis. Monographs can be formulaic, require a structure that is stultifying, require an academic artifice that hides practical applications and can make it seem like there is no light at the end of the tunnel.

Thesis by publication can lack coherence as a stand-alone project, rely on the vagaries of peer review, journal publication schedules and time frames and candidates compete for journal space with more experience and celebrated academics. However, one comment caused me to sit back and reflect – the candidate who only co-wrote with their supervisor always remained subordinate. They never experienced becoming a peer.

In the end I offered the PhD scholarship by monograph.

Thompson, Greg Who is the good high school student? Cambria Press

Here is one story which illustrates the difficulties that might be encountered, but it’s a story which also shows an intervention which made the publication process more manageable – and also educative.

Thomas completed a PhD by publication. He was required to write three articles and an exegesis, all of these in English; his first language is Norwegian. His PhD depended on having the three articles accepted for publication.

Thomas’ first article took two years from initial submission to final publication. During that time he had to make major revisions to it. His second article was accepted with minor revisions. His third article was rejected and had to be submitted to another journal altogether. But in the first and third articles there were conflicting reviews and an extended set of exchanges with reviewers and editors over many months. At times Thomas did not know whether he would meet the requirements for his PhD because of the level of critical comments he received. The time lapse and prolonged nature of revising and resubmitting, then revising again and resubmitting again, were extremely challenging. Thomas says

The nature of blind reviewing implies that the candidate receives the same level of feedback as is given to experienced scholars. The critiques of the reviewers and editors often appear frank and direct, which can be difficult and even destructive in the fragile course of learning for an inexperienced scholar. The role of the supervisor is crucial in helping the PhD candidate interpret and digest the feedback in order to make the comments beneficial and help the candidate revise his or her work.

Such high stakes publishing for a PhD raises the bar on the riskiness and importance of publication. Early career and doctoral researchers are highly dependent in such awards, not only on their supervisors as brokers, but on skilful editors to lead them through a difficult review process.

Many editors recognise the complex, sometimes hostile and contradictory advice offered in reviewer reports. Good editors understand that they need to guide authors about how to negotiate harsh and conflicting reviewer demands. They take an active role in synthesizing and giving direction – which advice to attend to fully, which to background, perhaps which to ignore.

Thomas describes the critical role of the editor in brokering his third article. The Editor received two conflicting reviews and then asked the reviewers to sort out their differences.

The editor described the disagreement and also attached the follow up discussion that occurred between the reviewers. The most interesting part of this is how the editor conveyed his message. First of all, he displayed the grounds of the rejection, preparing me for the frankness of the reviewers’ statements and thoroughly explained the considerations an editor needed to account for. The editor also made an effort to motivate me to continue my research and invited me to submit to the journal again. In this sense, the rejection gave me, as a PhD student, valuable insights into the review and editorial process.

This editorial intervention is quite unusual. It is rare to ask reviewers to resolve their differences. However, this editor’s intervention gave Thomas the opportunity to see a dialogue between scholars with different positions as they discussed his work and then came to an agreement about what would be required to bring it to publishable standards. It is more common for the editor to do this work- deciding which review recommendations to prioritise. Thomas’ supervisor was also crucial in this process. She provided support and wise counsel, helping Thomas to come understand what was happening and what he needed to do.

One question Thomas’ experience raises for me, as a journal editor, is whether it would be advantageous to know if a submission is from a PhD candidate. If I did know this I would of course not pass the information on to reviewers. However I would be inclined to take additional care about communicating the reviewers’ feedback and the recommendation back to the author. I might be able to make it a pedagogical experience. But would this be fair? Shouldn’t all submissions get the same level of care? Or do I as an editor have a special responsibility to new members of the scholarly community?

What do you think? In the light of the increasing number of PhD by publication researchers, and the increased demand for all doctoral researchers to publish, should journal editors adopt the policy of asking for the status of the person making the submission?

Thanks to Dr Thomas de Lange, University of Oslo, for permission to use his story.

Reading Pat’s latest blog post on the PhD by publication versus a written thesis stirred up many thoughts and feelings that I had been mulling over for a while. I think it is crucial to have an open conversation about the differences between these two paths, particularly in the context of the difficult employment market for PhD graduates. From my experience of these two PhD models, it seems that adopting the PhD by publication model more widely in the UK would need to be accompanied by other changes to the typical PhD programme.

When I embarked on my three year funded PhD in psychology in the UK, there was never any doubt that over the course of those three years I would write what I would describe as a ‘traditional’ thesis. That is, by the end of my PhD period, I would produce a multi-chapter written record of my research. The standard format in my department was three or four experimental chapters, in the style of research articles, sandwiched between a literature review chapter and a discussion chapter. The PhD student handbook provided guidance about the expected format and content of the thesis and a ‘research committee’ (now called a thesis advisory panel) oversaw that the research was progressing towards the end goal of a coherent thesis. This included the upgrade process at the end of the first year, where students were expected to submit a full draft of their literature review chapter, as well as any experimental work completed so far, in order to formally progress from the MPhil stage to a full PhD student. At no stage was there a discussion about whether I would opt out of this traditional process and instead aim to complete my PhD by publication. In fact, although I vaguely knew of this possibility, it never crossed my mind as a favourable option and I didn’t know anyone who had taken this route.

My first experience with the PhD by publication model was as a visiting PhD student in the Netherlands, and since, as a postdoc here. In my department at least, the typical route to a PhD is very different to my own PhD in the UK. There are commonalities, but I would certainly not say that they are equivalent. The most obvious difference is, of course, that students are expected to produce and publish around four original research articles in order to complete their PhD. At least two of these are expected to be published or in press in respected international journals by the time the thesis is defended. Often, all four articles are accepted or at least submitted before the thesis defense. These journal articles are then compiled (in their original format or with some edits) into a booklet, with an accompanying introduction and discussion chapter intended to tie the articles together.

At first glance, the two models described here probably sound very much the same. In the end, a PhD student following either route will have produced a body of work composed of around four research chapters, with an introduction and discussion chapter. However, I think the two routes are actually very different. For example, in the UK, PhD funding usually lasts three years, or 1+3 for a masters followed by a PhD. In the Netherlands, PhD funding is usually four years (although three year PhDs are becoming more common if the student already completed a two year research masters in a closely related research area). This extra year is usually the time when the first articles of the PhD are actually accepted and published and the final articles are submitted. It would be very difficult to research, write, and publish such a body of work in only three years. This means that UK PhDs tend to carry on working on the publication aspect of their PhD long after their funding ends, and possibly alongside their next job. It may even mean that a UK PhD needs to carry on writing these articles without any pay in order to have enough published work to compete for postdoc funding. This would be especially true in order to compete against European PhDs.

Another significant difference between my experiences as a UK PhD student, compared to a PhD student in the Netherlands comes down to money. PhD students in the Netherlands receive a monthly salary on a national pay scale that amounts to roughly twice my PhD bursary. Although I refer to them as students, in actual fact they are research employees of the university, with all of the benefits and responsibilities that accompany this; for example, paid holidays and a company pension come as standard, with the expectation that ten percent of one’s time will be spent on teaching, supervision, and admin duties.

I believe that these differences mean that PhD graduates in the Netherlands are ultimately more prepared for a research career because they are employed as a junior researcher from day one of their PhD. The whole PhD is structured around the realities of life as a researcher, such as writing for publication, the pressures and struggles of the peer review system, teaching obligations, and (usually during the fourth year) grant applications. However, without a full salary, and especially without the fourth year of salary, it would seem unrealistic to expect a PhD student to take on these responsibilities. This makes the UK PhD model seem quite artificial to me; a strange limbo between student and employee.

In sum, if I could go back, I would almost certainly choose the European PhD by publication route. However, I definitely would not choose to squeeze a PhD by publication into the UK’s three year PhD system. I think the time pressures and financial pressures this would create would be unworkable.

Another person commented that they felt that their PhD by publication had given them a head start on scholarly work. Rather than producing a tome that no one would ever read, they would complete their PhD with already published papers. Rather than a text produced for examiners only, they were writing with a real scholarly purpose for a real audience for a real publication – something that, as one Australian comment noted, is the norm of academic work. (It’s perhaps worth saying that one of the Australian doctorates by publication that I have examined did have, as the last of four publications, a paper for a professional readership and not a refereed journal, so a different real audience – this made the claim for potential contribution very strong.)

It’s probably not too hard to guess that, since I’m happy to examine PhDs by publication, I’m generally in favour of them. But it’s also important to note that my argument here is not about favoring one model or the other – I’m actually arguing for more discussion and more thinking about the equity implications of diversifying the doctorate. I’m also arguing for more discussion of the changes that are happening …

I’ve recently encountered more by-publication researchers in my writing workshops and had some discussions with some colleagues in mainland Europe who run Humanities and Social Sciences centres like I do. Putting all of this information together with the conference symposium on the diversifying routes that I referred to in the last post, I’ve come up with a starting list of four issues that seem to me to need a much greater scholarly airing.

(1) which journals to publish in?

None of the PhDs in arts, humanities and social sciences I’ve encountered on the by-publication route were writing for open-access journals. A minority were very concerned to publish in the highest status journal in their field – citation indices were held to be more important than readership. But it seemed that there had been little formal conversation in their institutions about where to publish – this decision remained something between supervisors and doctoral researchers. Unless they encountered them elsewhere, the by-publication doctoral researchers were largely sequestered from current debates about (a) open access versus commercial publication, and (b) the relative merits of different ways of counting citations and how these might/might not matter. Given that scholarship may well be their future, it seems important that the research training provided for all doctoral researchers does include something about the future of academic publishing.

It also seems that at present there is no way of knowing where by-publication route PhDs are choosing to publish. At some point, when someone does the numbers, we will get an answer to the question about who, if anyone, profits from their decisions. We may know if journals have noticed an increase in submissions. We will also have some idea about the distribution of the hidden costs of reviewing, and which peer reviewing communities have done the unrecompensed work of supporting the by-publication route. Sounds like a nice little research project to me!!

(2) are journal articles a better evaluation measure than the book?

Not all disciplines have given up on the book. While there may be debates about open and digital publication versus traditional commercial print publication, the production of the extended and evidenced argument still has value. It is even still ‘counted’ in the UK for audit purposes, although perhaps not as heavily weighted in some disciplines as some academics might think is desirable. The symbolic implication of changing the ‘test’ of scholarship from an extended monograph to the article does concern some disciplines more than others – although all of us ought not to let it pass unnoticed and without consideration.

On a practical level, some academics are concerned that the by-publication route does not include the possibility of a book (except for UK staff members, see previous post) and, more contentiously perhaps, some maintain that researchers will not be adequately prepared for scholarly work if they have not had the experience of producing a long monograph as their PhD. But equally, it could be argued that the monograph does not prepare researchers for writing high quality journal articles and that this also is important. However, there has to date been little discussion and debate about the various affordances of each doctoral genre and the parity between them.

The compromise seems to be – in the UK at least -that many doctoral researchers now find that they have to do both! There certainly has not been nearly enough discussion about the increasing press on the UK doctorate, where there is an expectation of engagement in a range of training modules and involvement in more career training including interning and writing for publication and producing a monograph within a three year time period. This performative creep certainly deserves widespread scholarly discussion.

(3) what are the three papers about?

One of the most important issues at stake in the by-publication route is the decision about the focus of the three papers. In most instances of the by-publication route (saving the UK staff member by publication process), doctoral researchers are still expected to produce a proposal for a research project. They must still do the literatures work and the methodological and methods work in the same way as the PhD by-monograph researcher. Their research might then be staged, with a paper emerging from each of the stages. Or the research might be one larger project from which three distinct papers are taken.

However, I have seen researchers come adrift is in trying to make one paper about literatures, one about methodology and methods and the other about the actual research. Troubles have arisen because the researcher simply didn’t have enough reading and enough experience to write with sufficient depth about them, and didn’t know the fields well enough to be clear about the contribution their literatures/methods paper would make. But this example may not be widespread (and how would I know given the lack of systematic research in the area?). But the example does make me wonder if there are better or worse, easier or harder, ways to sort out the focus for the papers. It seems to me that it would be helpful if there were some kind of forum where by-publication doctoral supervisors and researchers could simply share experiences about the process. There is probably, as is the case with doctoral education more generally, all kinds of wisdom currently locked up in individual supervision relationships and institutions. And it’d be very helpful to make that more public.

(4) the perils of the writing for reviewing process

The most hazardous part of the by-publication – as opposed to publishable papers – PhD opportunity, is obviously bound up with the writing and reviewing process. By-publication route doctoral researchers all have to assume the textual identity of expert and write with the commensurate scholarly authority quite early in their candidature. This is not easy for any doctoral researcher – the imposter syndrome is alive and well – and it would be interesting to know if assuming the expert position is easier, the same or harder for by-publication route candidates.

And it does seem that many of the European PhD by-publication institutions do not offer doctoral researchers additional support for the text work/identity work of journal publication. While they do offer training courses in research methods, less attention is paid to the writing/thinking/identity work of publication. Science doctoral researchers typically get this support in lab settings but this is not the case for most arts, humanities and social science doctoral researchers. This lack of attention to writing is not confined to the by-publication route of course, but it is perhaps something that one might expect institutions espousing the by-publication route to take a lead on, given the critical importance of writing in the journal article route.

The press for completion that is now increasingly the norm right across Europe, not just in the UK, also may have the down-side of leaving candidates no option but to publish quickly, in a timeline which may not match their actual thinking time. The notion of slow thinking/quick writing does not map easily onto any of the current doctoral paths and it remains to be seen which route finds it more of an issue. Perhaps asking in depth questions about publication is something that institutions need to do – they could be routinely talking with doctoral researchers and supervisors about writing and publication, not simply reporting whether it has occurred.

Finally of course, there are the vagaries of the reviewing process. That will be the topic of a future post. I’m going to introduce one of the Norwegian researchers from our symposium. His story of being peer reviewed is not about a cruel reviewer, quite the opposite – and indeed that will be part of the point. However the next post is by Katie Wheat who reflects on her experiences of the UK doctorate in the light of seeing the mainland European by-publication route close up.

About eighteen months ago some colleagues and I decided to get together a symposium on the PhD and publication, and the PhD by publication. We were from Norway and the UK and were a group made up of supervisors and early career researchers. Our group represented some of the diversity of what the PhD by/and publication currently means. Norway has recently embraced the PhD by publication whereas in the UK the monograph still reigns. The UK PhD by publication is relatively uncommon – except for staff members (see this piece in the Times Higher on the state of play). Here is our group – a Norwegian and a UK supervisor plus:

Norwegian researcher 1: PhD as monograph in Norwegian. Published a book in Norwegian while doing the PhD, plus articles in Norwegian. Now working to convert PhD into English language articles for peer reviewed journals.

Norwegian researcher 2: PhD by publication, three papers published in international peer reviewed journals, written in English. Now doing postdoctoral work to extend research.

English researcher 1: PhD as monograph in English. One article in English published during PhD with supervisor, but two more single authored during PhD were subsequently published. Book from PhD.

English researcher 2: Academic staff member doing PhD by publication. One book and ten peer-reviewed articles in international journals plus ten thousand word exegesis were submitted for examination.

It is clear that there are very different experiences of doctoral research and publication distributed over just these four people in two countries. As a symposium we had to ask the question about parity between them.

It was pretty obvious that the UK model for staff PhD by publication was much more demanding than any of the other three. We understood that the UK PhD by publication had developed as a way of recognizing and rewarding staff who came into the university from professional backgrounds and then took up scholarly work in the same way as colleagues with PhDs. The publication route meant/means that they are able to aggregate these publications into an award. But these publications also of course contribute to institutional research performance, for example the REF, in a different way to PhDs.

But the career and post doc competition in both countries meant/means that thesis by monograph researchers were also writing articles and even books, as one of our symposium had, at the same time as producing the Big Book. While this wasn’t a requirement for the award, it was still an increasing practice. How would researchers with PhDs by publication fare in competitive contexts when compared with the PhD-with-the-lot? And is the unofficial ratcheting up of the PhD requirement fair – and what effect does writing other publications have on the monograph itself?

The language question was writ very large for the Norwegian PhDs. Writing in English was an additional requirement and was potentially more difficult than writing in mother tongue Norwegian. And it accelerated the international trend to move scholarly work into the English language, away from the plethora of European languages and their different modes of scholarship and genres of writing.

Our symposium was also interested in the differences between writing a journal article and writing an extended monograph of up to 100,000 words. The sheer challenge of constructing a sustained argument over this many words clearly prepared the PhD for the book in ways that writing journal articles might not. So was there also something here, we wondered, about the PhD by journal publication being a way of preparing the audit ready scholar, already primed to turn out articles for high status journals, as opposed to what might appear as the increasingly less audit valued process of producing a monograph?

It is important to put on record that our symposium wasn’t suggesting that the solution to this increasing diversity should be some kind of monolithic pan-European doctorate, an extension of the Bologna process that would involve massive amounts of moderation, record keeping and audit. This would be the simple knee jerk bureaucratic response to emergent diversity. We did think that there might be a set of questions to discuss about the criteria used to evaluate/examine doctorates, and some work at the edges of what were reasonable expectations and what were not. We were very clear that there ought to be a conversation among the scholarly community at large about diversity and equity – it wasn’t something just for national policy-makers to think about.

The changes we were addressing are of course not the only changes in the doctorate. There are also increasing pressures on narrow nineteenth century definitions of the thesis by monograph brought about via digital and arts informed scholarship, and these too need to be taken into account in any discussions.

At the time we presented our symposium we were thinking about a special issue of a journal, but we were unable to get any Editors interested. It was telling, we thought, that the ‘gateway’ to the academy was changing but it seemed to be of so little interest. We had something to talk about, but no venue. So I’ve decided to put a few of the key issues we talked about into blog posts, so at least some of them have an airing.

Next week I’ll post about the relationship between PhD by publication and the refereeing and publication process which – as you can imagine – is not straight forward.

I was thinking about this last week as I was giving feedback after a viva and hoping that the candidate was hearing all the good things and not just the small corrections we wanted her to do. But I wasn’t confident that she would remember what we said were the clear and evident strengths of the work. I feared she would go away thinking only about the things that needed a bit more attention.

Now I know that the argument is that our brains are set up to remember traumas because it’s part of the way we survive, but does this really extend to criticism, as well as to massively dreadful events? Well, I gather it does, and the rationale seems to be that it helps us learn. It seems that negative events are necessary and we use them to avoid making the same mistakes again. It doesn’t need to be dramatic, it can be something as apparently positive as constructively worded critical feedback.

While I was thinking about this I saw a twitter conversation about bad reviews. Here’s how it went – and this is quoted with permission from @SDMumford, a colleague and Philosophy Prof at Nottingham.

Read old rejection letter from 1996. Referee could just’ve said no without instead arguing I was a cretin with no clue about dispositions.
Referee’s comments were cruel and venomous as if he wanted me to give up philosophy for good. Clear message that I was an imbecile.
He gave his name quite proudly. I was a nobody.
I know exactly who it was as he didn’t hide his name. Glad I didn’t give up.
Maybe the paper wasn’t great (even though it became a central part of my Dispositions book)
Insecurity on referee’s part?
If I referee a paper I think poor, I say that it needs more thought and you should consider this and that. I don’t say you are a moron.
I had a gem of a rejection not too long ago in which the referee alleged I could barely write English.

Now pretty well all of us can immediately understand what @SDMumford is getting at. The vast majority of us have had articles rejected, and even with the best will in the world and the most careful wording, rejection is one of those negative experiences that sticks with you. And most of us do learn from the experience.

Unless of course you’re a slow learner like me. Confession time. I’ve just been asked to do major corrections on a paper and I have to say that I feel a bit stupid right now, because the problems the reviewers identified are ones that I teach other people to avoid… if I had taken more time over the paper and not rushed at it I would have realised its deficiencies myself. The reviews were OK – the negativity of the experience is simply because I’m very cross with myself. I actually know that it takes time for me to do a piece of theoretical work and any time I try to go too fast the work is always deficient. The problem in this case was that I just didn’t remember what I know about what I have to do to write a good paper and the reviewers found me out.

But it seems that rather a lot of us have had a review which wasn’t just negative, it was just downright rude. As a journal editor I occasionally see some quite awful reviewer responses which never get sent out to authors. One I can remember said simply “This is what gives academics a bad name”.

I’m cheered by the fact that the material that @SDMumford was castigated about did live on. It’s not the first time I’ve heard about people going on from a rejection to write something significant. In the acknowledgements to his book on policy narratives Hugh Miller begins by saying

This project began as an article manuscript that (name of journal and editor) urged me to revise and resubmit in response to anonymous reviewers’ comments. I gave it a try. Problem was, by the time I responded to the issues raised in the reviews, the manuscript had expanded to 50 pages. Nevertheless, I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions that helped get this book underway. (p. vii)

So there really is a reason to see rejection as leading somewhere, even if not to an immediate publication. A well worded and thoughtful review can be a positive as well as a negative experience. It can work to help us learn what to do next – even if like me, you occasionally forget to remember what it is you already have learned that you have to do.

However, there’s absolutely no excuse for poor reviewer behaviour. You don’t have to be rude, arrogant or vitriolic in order to reject a colleague’s work or to help them learn. Just the rejection is negative impact enough on its own.

Oh – and I’ve been fantasizing about a wall of shame of bad reviews. @SDMumford might start us off with his 1996 review, but I really need more examples. Have you had not just a negative, but actually a downright genuinely dreadfully nasty horrible traumatising review you need to get off your chest? I could start a bit of a virtual exhibition if I had enough samples!!