THE FIFTH DISCIPLINE The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization

Universities increasingly expect students to publish during a PhD candidature because it benefits the candidate, supervisor, institution, and wider community. Here, we describe a method successfully used by early-career researchers including PhD candidates to undertake and publish literature reviews – a challenge for researchers new to a field. Our method allows researchers new to a field to systematically analyse existing academic literature to produce a structured quantitative summary of the field. This method is a more straightforward and systematic approach than the traditional ‘narrative method’ common to many student theses. When published, this type of review can also complement existing narrative reviews produced by experts in a field by quantitatively assessing the literature, including identifying research gaps. The method can also be used as the initial step for further analysis, including identifying suitable datasets for meta-analysis. Students report that the method is enabling and rewarding.

/pdf/the-benefits-of-publishing-systematic-quantitative-qp18v8q7gq.pdf

The benefits of publishing systematic quantitative literature reviews for PhD candidates and other early-career researchers

Neural networks are used in business organizations for providing intelligent decision support. The ABI/Inform bibliographic database has over 1 000 publications on business-related research in neur...

A bibliometric analysis

Research education, or training, as it is often termed, is attracting greater scrutiny as research itself is seen of greater importance in the global knowledge economy. In turn, concerns to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of research supervision are leading to the introduction and extension of programmes for supervisor development. This article presents a framework for an approach to supervisor development, based on the assumption that in order to discuss supervisor development it is important to understand what supervisors do and why. The article examines the nature of the educative process for research students in the current research environment. It articulates the generic processes supervisors need to engage in for effective supervision, if students are to develop in differing institutional, disciplinary and professional contexts the appropriate expertise and attributes for employment; and presents an outline of what might constitute a flexible professional development programme for superviso...

Research Training and Supervision Development

A competitive higher education environment marked by increased accountability and quality assurance measures for doctoral study, including the structured training of doctoral supervisors, has highlighted the need to clearly articulate and delineate the work of supervising doctoral students. This article responds to this imperative by examining the question: in the contemporary university, what do doctoral supervisors do and how might their work be theorized? The response draws on life history interviews with doctoral supervisors in five broad disciplines/fields, working in a large metropolitan university in Australia. Based on empirical analyses, doctoral supervision is theorized as professional work that comprises five facets: the learning alliance, habits of mind, scholarly expertise, techne and contextual expertise. The article proposes that this model offers a more precise discourse, language and theory for understanding and preparing for the work of doctoral supervision in the contemporary university.

Retheorizing doctoral supervision as professional work

The major growth of doctoral education in recent decades has attracted attention from policy makers and researchers. In this article we explore the growth of doctoral education in Australia, its impact on diversity in respect of the doctoral population, shifts in disciplinary strengths, institutional concentration and award programs. We conclude that there has been both change and continuity in the provision of doctoral education with extensive variation at the level of practice in what is a reasonably stable system featuring continuing hierarchical institutional diversification. The limitations of available data and issues for further research, policy and practice are discussed.

Growth and diversity in doctoral education: assessing the Australian experience

Although there is general agreement that doctoral students and their experiences are diverse, in what respect this is true is in question. Most institutional practices in the collection of data in this regard have been established to satisfy government reporting requirements and concerns, such as funding, participation and equity, and efficiency. Missing is more detailed and nuanced quantitative data and analysis, complementary to those of qualitative studies, to illuminate the nature and extent of doctoral student diversity and the effects on the quality of their candidacy. Drawing on select data and findings from a national survey of Australian doctoral candidates conducted in 2005, the article questions the utility of commonly used categories for quantitative data collection and analysis, and their use as the basis of (sub)groupings to represent doctoral diversity. In so doing, it presents a more complex picture of doctoral candidature that depicts the idiosyncrasy of the individual experience, as well...

/pdf/how-shall-we-know-them-capturing-the-diversity-of-difference-3e7n7g7fld.pdf

How shall we know them? Capturing the diversity of difference in Australian doctoral candidates and their experiences

This paper centers on doctoral-level education candidates in the United States and Australia and their realms of engagement with information. On the basis of in-depth interviews with American and Australian doctoral students and academic librarians, we pose a critical reflection upon the two doctoral pedagogies as they relate to experiences of doctoral candidates as intentional learners, doctoral students' engagement with information, and information literacy learning. Rather than viewing commencing doctoral students as information deficient, we prefer to value their experiences, their profiles, and the ways that existing understandings about information shape their information engagements.

Doctoral Students' Engagement with Information: An American-Australian Perspective

Why do a Prof Doc when you can do a PhD

This paper reports on an aspect of a pilot project in 2003 by the authors comprising a bibliographic analysis of all (51,000+) Australian PhDs. The pilot work provides both data and methodological bases for a larger project that investigates the nature and development of PhDs in Australia as they evolved in the context of economic, social and educational changes. This paper reviews the evidence from the bibliographic data held in library catalogues of PhDs in each Australian university. It provides a review of the numbers and range of PhDs in Australia for each decade from 1950 to 2000. This is contextualised in terms of the changes to Australian tertiary education over the period and other factors that contribute to the rise of PhDs in Australia.

/pdf/a-decadic-review-of-phds-in-australia-nsdmkvt0vu.pdf

Peter Macauley

Papers

Growth and diversity in doctoral education: assessing the Australian experience

How shall we know them? Capturing the diversity of difference in Australian doctoral candidates and their experiences

Doctoral Students' Engagement with Information: An American-Australian Perspective

Why do a Prof Doc when you can do a PhD

A decadic review of PhDs in Australia