Critical Reflections on Doctoral Research and Supervision in Human Geography: The ‘PhD by Publication’

Abstract

Doctoral education is central to both the production of knowledge and the reproduction of disciplines—producing the next generation of researchers. This paper considers the doctoral and supervisory experiences associated with the ‘the PhD by publication’—in which a dissertation comprises a number of stand-alone ‘publishable’ papers, along with introductory and concluding overviews. Using the entry points of human geography and our experiences doing and supervising these PhDs, we provide a number of guidelines for human geographers, and illuminate the identity work involved in this specific process of producing scholars.

Keywords:

• PhD students
• academic identity
• research supervision
• publishing

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to four anonymous referees and the editors for their insightful comments on previous drafts of this paper.

Notes

¹ In North America, the terms ‘advising’ and ‘advisor’ are more commonly used to describe the process of guiding a research student/doctoral candidate through to completion. We use the European and Australian terms ‘supervision’ here.

² Currently, Dowling is coordinating Macquarie University's Supervision Enhancement Program which is designed to enhance supervision practices across the university (see http://www.mq.edu.au/ltc/about_lt/hdr/program_2011.htm).