first year phd literature review

• The First 6 Months - Tackling the Literature Review

For most PhD students, the first year is dominated by writing a literature review . For anyone yet to meet this particular beast, a literature review is a summary of all the key research completed in your field, highlighting gaps in understanding that future studies need to address. This is commonly completed in your first year to build your knowledge of the subject and identify questions which your research could aim to answer. Your literature review also forms part of your confirmation report, which you need to complete at the end of your first year to be confirmed as a doctoral candidate. This will be a really rewarding document to look back on at the end of the PhD to see how your research has contributed to the field. However, knowing where to start can be daunting so here are my top tips to help.

#1 Decide on your review style early on

Your literature review can be systematic or narrative. A narrative review is the way most people think to approach a literature review: you start with a few key words and then grow your search organically by following the citations of key papers. You can keep changing your search words to find more articles and can decide which papers you want to use with minimal justification. The alternative is a systematic review. As the name suggests this style has a stricter system with defined search terms and exclusion/inclusion criteria. This helps you find all the possible articles which you then narrow down the ones to review using detailed criteria. Which style of review is appropriate will depend on your topic and research question. Talk to your supervisor about which type of review you are aiming for.

#2 Find an organisation method that works for you

The key challenge with the literature review is managing the sheer volume of papers you read. As I have advised before, write EVERYTHING down. You will never remember exactly what you read or where you found it. A sure sign of a PhD student is that we have a billion tabs open – all papers that we intend to read at some point but will probably never get round to! This means that the icon for each tab is so small that even keeping the article open isn’t a sure-fire way to find it again! Deciding on a notetaking system that works for you is really important; the earlier into your reading journey you do this, the easier it will be. I personally use a spreadsheet with the article name, first author, year, key words (which I can use to filter for relevant paragraphs when writing) and key notes about the paper. This system also means I can check that I haven’t read a paper before (trust me, it happens!!). People record their notes differently - my trusty spreadsheet might not work for you. Find what suits you and then stick to it. It's also important to decide on a reference management system early on so you can add your articles in as your read them and keep an accurate bibliography. This will make it easier when you need to import citations into your literature review and means you can make your reference list automatically through systems like EndNote or Mendeley.

#3 Know when to start writing

Obviously, you can’t start writing straight away – you have to read the literature to be able to review it! However, it’s hard to know when to stop reading and put pen to paper. This is a personal decision, but I started writing as soon as I felt I had a good understanding of a mini topic. I divided my literature review into key sections and then researched and wrote a draft for each in turn. This broke up the tasks into smaller chunks and made it feel more achievable. Starting writing can also show you areas where you’re missing references to support your point. This creates a feedback cycle of more reading and more writing to strength your review.

Start writing whichever section you feel most confident in. This doesn’t have to be the first section. My background is in Biomedical Sciences so I was more confident on those sections than the topics which were newer to me. Writing these paragraphs first helped me build confidence and develop my writing style. Send this first section to your supervisors so they can get a feel for your writing voice early on. The first time you send your work off is really daunting but remember they are there to help and support you, not assess you. Their feedback will help grow your literature review to the standard of your future thesis.

#4 Keep updating and refreshing articles

The nature of literature is that it keeps growing. This means you can’t do one search and assume that 6 months later you still have all the relevant articles. New research is being published every day so make sure to keep checking for any key developments. The library team at your university may be able to help you set up alerts for key words so that you never miss a crucial paper. If there are a few key players in your area, follow them on social media so you’ll see if they publish anything new. Accepting that you will miss papers the first-time round is all part of the process of reviewing and it can be exciting to see how the field has changed in the 6 months since you last checked results.

#5 Trust that you are the right person to write the review

I felt very strange about summarising (and sometimes criticising) the work of established researchers. However, over the course of writing your literature review you will start to better understand the field and be able to critically analyse the work that has gone before you. Imposter syndrome has a huge effect on review authors but trust that you are the right person to write this review and by the end you’ll know enough to summarise the work completed. All PhD students struggle with this feeling so talk to other researchers; there may also be some university provided courses on imposter syndrome to help you see your abilities more clearly.

Doing my literature review in the last six months has increased my confidence when discussing my project with others. Taking the time to do your review well will stand you in better stead when you start collecting research presenting results. Plus, it’s satisfying to see all the progress you’ve made when you look at your 10,000-word document. You can do it!!

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• Knowledge Base

Methodology

• How to Write a Literature Review | Guide, Examples, & Templates

How to Write a Literature Review | Guide, Examples, & Templates

Published on January 2, 2023 by Shona McCombes . Revised on September 11, 2023.

What is a literature review? A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. It provides an overview of current knowledge, allowing you to identify relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing research that you can later apply to your paper, thesis, or dissertation topic .

There are five key steps to writing a literature review:

• Search for relevant literature
• Evaluate sources
• Identify themes, debates, and gaps
• Outline the structure
• Write your literature review

A good literature review doesn’t just summarize sources—it analyzes, synthesizes , and critically evaluates to give a clear picture of the state of knowledge on the subject.

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Table of contents

What is the purpose of a literature review, examples of literature reviews, step 1 – search for relevant literature, step 2 – evaluate and select sources, step 3 – identify themes, debates, and gaps, step 4 – outline your literature review’s structure, step 5 – write your literature review, free lecture slides, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions, introduction.

• Quick Run-through
• Step 1 & 2

When you write a thesis , dissertation , or research paper , you will likely have to conduct a literature review to situate your research within existing knowledge. The literature review gives you a chance to:

• Demonstrate your familiarity with the topic and its scholarly context
• Develop a theoretical framework and methodology for your research
• Position your work in relation to other researchers and theorists
• Show how your research addresses a gap or contributes to a debate
• Evaluate the current state of research and demonstrate your knowledge of the scholarly debates around your topic.

Writing literature reviews is a particularly important skill if you want to apply for graduate school or pursue a career in research. We’ve written a step-by-step guide that you can follow below.

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Writing literature reviews can be quite challenging! A good starting point could be to look at some examples, depending on what kind of literature review you’d like to write.

• Example literature review #1: “Why Do People Migrate? A Review of the Theoretical Literature” ( Theoretical literature review about the development of economic migration theory from the 1950s to today.)
• Example literature review #2: “Literature review as a research methodology: An overview and guidelines” ( Methodological literature review about interdisciplinary knowledge acquisition and production.)
• Example literature review #3: “The Use of Technology in English Language Learning: A Literature Review” ( Thematic literature review about the effects of technology on language acquisition.)
• Example literature review #4: “Learners’ Listening Comprehension Difficulties in English Language Learning: A Literature Review” ( Chronological literature review about how the concept of listening skills has changed over time.)

You can also check out our templates with literature review examples and sample outlines at the links below.

Download Word doc Download Google doc

Before you begin searching for literature, you need a clearly defined topic .

If you are writing the literature review section of a dissertation or research paper, you will search for literature related to your research problem and questions .

Make a list of keywords

Start by creating a list of keywords related to your research question. Include each of the key concepts or variables you’re interested in, and list any synonyms and related terms. You can add to this list as you discover new keywords in the process of your literature search.

• Social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok
• Body image, self-perception, self-esteem, mental health
• Generation Z, teenagers, adolescents, youth

Search for relevant sources

Use your keywords to begin searching for sources. Some useful databases to search for journals and articles include:

• Your university’s library catalogue
• Google Scholar
• Project Muse (humanities and social sciences)
• Medline (life sciences and biomedicine)
• EconLit (economics)
• Inspec (physics, engineering and computer science)

You can also use boolean operators to help narrow down your search.

Make sure to read the abstract to find out whether an article is relevant to your question. When you find a useful book or article, you can check the bibliography to find other relevant sources.

You likely won’t be able to read absolutely everything that has been written on your topic, so it will be necessary to evaluate which sources are most relevant to your research question.

For each publication, ask yourself:

• What question or problem is the author addressing?
• What are the key concepts and how are they defined?
• What are the key theories, models, and methods?
• Does the research use established frameworks or take an innovative approach?
• What are the results and conclusions of the study?
• How does the publication relate to other literature in the field? Does it confirm, add to, or challenge established knowledge?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the research?

Make sure the sources you use are credible , and make sure you read any landmark studies and major theories in your field of research.

You can use our template to summarize and evaluate sources you’re thinking about using. Click on either button below to download.

Take notes and cite your sources

As you read, you should also begin the writing process. Take notes that you can later incorporate into the text of your literature review.

It is important to keep track of your sources with citations to avoid plagiarism . It can be helpful to make an annotated bibliography , where you compile full citation information and write a paragraph of summary and analysis for each source. This helps you remember what you read and saves time later in the process.

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To begin organizing your literature review’s argument and structure, be sure you understand the connections and relationships between the sources you’ve read. Based on your reading and notes, you can look for:

• Trends and patterns (in theory, method or results): do certain approaches become more or less popular over time?
• Themes: what questions or concepts recur across the literature?
• Debates, conflicts and contradictions: where do sources disagree?
• Pivotal publications: are there any influential theories or studies that changed the direction of the field?
• Gaps: what is missing from the literature? Are there weaknesses that need to be addressed?

This step will help you work out the structure of your literature review and (if applicable) show how your own research will contribute to existing knowledge.

• Most research has focused on young women.
• There is an increasing interest in the visual aspects of social media.
• But there is still a lack of robust research on highly visual platforms like Instagram and Snapchat—this is a gap that you could address in your own research.

There are various approaches to organizing the body of a literature review. Depending on the length of your literature review, you can combine several of these strategies (for example, your overall structure might be thematic, but each theme is discussed chronologically).

Chronological

The simplest approach is to trace the development of the topic over time. However, if you choose this strategy, be careful to avoid simply listing and summarizing sources in order.

Try to analyze patterns, turning points and key debates that have shaped the direction of the field. Give your interpretation of how and why certain developments occurred.

If you have found some recurring central themes, you can organize your literature review into subsections that address different aspects of the topic.

For example, if you are reviewing literature about inequalities in migrant health outcomes, key themes might include healthcare policy, language barriers, cultural attitudes, legal status, and economic access.

Methodological

If you draw your sources from different disciplines or fields that use a variety of research methods , you might want to compare the results and conclusions that emerge from different approaches. For example:

• Look at what results have emerged in qualitative versus quantitative research
• Discuss how the topic has been approached by empirical versus theoretical scholarship
• Divide the literature into sociological, historical, and cultural sources

Theoretical

A literature review is often the foundation for a theoretical framework . You can use it to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of key concepts.

You might argue for the relevance of a specific theoretical approach, or combine various theoretical concepts to create a framework for your research.

Like any other academic text , your literature review should have an introduction , a main body, and a conclusion . What you include in each depends on the objective of your literature review.

The introduction should clearly establish the focus and purpose of the literature review.

Depending on the length of your literature review, you might want to divide the body into subsections. You can use a subheading for each theme, time period, or methodological approach.

As you write, you can follow these tips:

• Summarize and synthesize: give an overview of the main points of each source and combine them into a coherent whole
• Analyze and interpret: don’t just paraphrase other researchers — add your own interpretations where possible, discussing the significance of findings in relation to the literature as a whole
• Critically evaluate: mention the strengths and weaknesses of your sources
• Write in well-structured paragraphs: use transition words and topic sentences to draw connections, comparisons and contrasts

In the conclusion, you should summarize the key findings you have taken from the literature and emphasize their significance.

When you’ve finished writing and revising your literature review, don’t forget to proofread thoroughly before submitting. Not a language expert? Check out Scribbr’s professional proofreading services !

This article has been adapted into lecture slides that you can use to teach your students about writing a literature review.

Scribbr slides are free to use, customize, and distribute for educational purposes.

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If you want to know more about the research process , methodology , research bias , or statistics , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

• Sampling methods
• Simple random sampling
• Stratified sampling
• Cluster sampling
• Likert scales
• Reproducibility

 Statistics

• Null hypothesis
• Statistical power
• Probability distribution
• Effect size
• Poisson distribution

Research bias

• Optimism bias
• Cognitive bias
• Implicit bias
• Hawthorne effect
• Anchoring bias
• Explicit bias

A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources (such as books, journal articles, and theses) related to a specific topic or research question .

It is often written as part of a thesis, dissertation , or research paper , in order to situate your work in relation to existing knowledge.

There are several reasons to conduct a literature review at the beginning of a research project:

• To familiarize yourself with the current state of knowledge on your topic
• To ensure that you’re not just repeating what others have already done
• To identify gaps in knowledge and unresolved problems that your research can address
• To develop your theoretical framework and methodology
• To provide an overview of the key findings and debates on the topic

Writing the literature review shows your reader how your work relates to existing research and what new insights it will contribute.

The literature review usually comes near the beginning of your thesis or dissertation . After the introduction , it grounds your research in a scholarly field and leads directly to your theoretical framework or methodology .

A literature review is a survey of credible sources on a topic, often used in dissertations , theses, and research papers . Literature reviews give an overview of knowledge on a subject, helping you identify relevant theories and methods, as well as gaps in existing research. Literature reviews are set up similarly to other  academic texts , with an introduction , a main body, and a conclusion .

An  annotated bibliography is a list of  source references that has a short description (called an annotation ) for each of the sources. It is often assigned as part of the research process for a  paper .  

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A guide for first year PhD students: Expectations, responsibilities, advice

The first year of a PhD can feel like a rollercoaster ride. First-year PhD students are ambitious and want to fulfil expectations. At the same time, they may be unsure of what these expectations and their responsibilities are. This guide aims to provide first-year PhD students with some directions and advice.

The first year as a PhD student: Excitement, ambition, overwhelm

Starting a PhD is exciting. Securing a PhD position is a major life event, and often something that first-year year PhD students have been working towards for a long time.

First-year PhD students want to do well, make progress with their projects and meet their supervisors’ expectations. However, it is not always clear what that means.

Questions like these, and insecurities, often develop early on in a PhD journey.

What to expect as a first-year PhD student

Succeeding in academia has many facets, including your thesis or dissertation, but also learning new skills, and developing relationships with supervisors, colleagues and scholars in your field. All of that takes energy.

Set realistic expectations for yourself in the first year of your PhD. Not everything will work out as planned. Research takes time, and setbacks are inevitable.

First-year PhD students can also expect to read and explore a lot. At times, this involves going down the rabbit hole of academic literature: processing new information, frameworks and perspectives before discarding them again.

Responsibilities of a first-year PhD student

However, frequently a key responsibility of a PhD student is to develop a firm research proposal in the first year, which is often coupled with an extensive literature review.

All in all, a first-year PhD student is responsible to get organised and create a feasible plan for the coming years. The first year is meant to set the foundation for the PhD trajectory .

Unless the PhD programme is followed online, and unless there is a pandemic raging, first-year PhD students are additionally often expected to actively participate in the research group, lab or department in which they are based.

A supervisor’s expectations of a first-year PhD student

While this can certainly happen, I dare to say that this is not the norm.

For instance, PhD supervisors tend to appreciate some levels of regularity and consistency. While it is absolutely normal to have periods where you make more progress (for instance in writing) than in others, it is not good to contact your supervisor every day for a month, and then fall off the earth for half a year.

Lastly, supervisors often expect PhD students to take matters into their own hands. Instead of simply waiting for instruction, this means that first-year PhD students should be in the driver’s seat of their journey. Therefore, it is no surprise that proactiveness is one of the 10 qualities of successful PhD students.

25 things every first year PhD student should do

Thesis/dissertation, academic skills, relationships and networking, health and well-being, master academia, get new content delivered directly to your inbox, deciding between a one- or a two-year master's degree, email signatures for phd students (content, tips and examples), related articles, key quotes to motivate and drive academic success, 10 reasons not to do a master’s degree, 10 signs of a bad phd supervisor, 3 sample recommendation letters for brilliant students.

• What Is a PhD Literature Review?
• Doing a PhD

A literature review is a critical analysis of published academic literature, mainly peer-reviewed papers and books, on a specific topic. This isn’t just a list of published studies but is a document summarising and critically appraising the main work by researchers in the field, the key findings, limitations and gaps identified in the knowledge.

• The aim of a literature review is to critically assess the literature in your chosen field of research and be able to present an overview of the current knowledge gained from previous work.
• By the conclusion of your literature review, you as a researcher should have identified the gaps in knowledge in your field; i.e. the unanswered research questions which your PhD project will help to answer.
• Quality not quantity is the approach to use when writing a literature review for a PhD but as a general rule of thumb, most are between 6,000 and 12,000 words.

What Is the Purpose of a Literature Review?

First, to be clear on what a PhD literature review is NOT: it is not a ‘paper by paper’ summary of what others have done in your field. All you’re doing here is listing out all the papers and book chapters you’ve found with some text joining things together. This is a common mistake made by PhD students early on in their research project. This is a sign of poor academic writing and if it’s not picked up by your supervisor, it’ll definitely be by your examiners.

The biggest issue your examiners will have here is that you won’t have demonstrated an application of critical thinking when examining existing knowledge from previous research. This is an important part of the research process as a PhD student. It’s needed to show where the gaps in knowledge were, and how then you were able to identify the novelty of each research question and subsequent work.

The five main outcomes from carrying out a good literature review should be:

• An understanding of what has been published in your subject area of research,
• An appreciation of the leading research groups and authors in your field and their key contributions to the research topic,
• Knowledge of the key theories in your field,
• Knowledge of the main research areas within your field of interest,
• A clear understanding of the research gap in knowledge that will help to motivate your PhD research questions .

When assessing the academic papers or books that you’ve come across, you must think about the strengths and weaknesses of them; what was novel about their work and what were the limitations? Are different sources of relevant literature coming to similar conclusions and complementing each other, or are you seeing different outcomes on the same topic by different researchers?

When Should I Write My Literature Review?

In the structure of your PhD thesis , your literature review is effectively your first main chapter. It’s at the start of your thesis and should, therefore, be a task you perform at the start of your research. After all, you need to have reviewed the literature to work out how your research can contribute novel findings to your area of research. Sometimes, however, in particular when you apply for a PhD project with a pre-defined research title and research questions, your supervisor may already know where the gaps in knowledge are.

You may be tempted to skip the literature review and dive straight into tackling the set questions (then completing the review at the end before thesis submission) but we strongly advise against this. Whilst your supervisor will be very familiar with the area, you as a doctoral student will not be and so it is essential that you gain this understanding before getting into the research.

How Long Should the Literature Review Be?

As your literature review will be one of your main thesis chapters, it needs to be a substantial body of work. It’s not a good strategy to have a thesis writing process here based on a specific word count, but know that most reviews are typically between 6,000 and 12,000 words. The length will depend on how much relevant material has previously been published in your field.

A point to remember though is that the review needs to be easy to read and avoid being filled with unnecessary information; in your search of selected literature, consider filtering out publications that don’t appear to add anything novel to the discussion – this might be useful in fields with hundreds of papers.

How Do I Write the Literature Review?

Before you start writing your literature review, you need to be clear on the topic you are researching.

1. Evaluating and Selecting the Publications

After completing your literature search and downloading all the papers you find, you may find that you have a lot of papers to read through ! You may find that you have so many papers that it’s unreasonable to read through all of them in their entirety, so you need to find a way to understand what they’re about and decide if they’re important quickly.

A good starting point is to read the abstract of the paper to gauge if it is useful and, as you do so, consider the following questions in your mind:

• What was the overarching aim of the paper?
• What was the methodology used by the authors?
• Was this an experimental study or was this more theoretical in its approach?
• What were the results and what did the authors conclude in their paper?
• How does the data presented in this paper relate to other publications within this field?
• Does it add new knowledge, does it raise more questions or does it confirm what is already known in your field? What is the key concept that the study described?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of this study, and in particular, what are the limitations?

2. Identifying Themes

To put together the structure of your literature review you need to identify the common themes that emerge from the collective papers and books that you have read. Key things to think about are:

• Are there common methodologies different authors have used or have these changed over time?
• Do the research questions change over time or are the key question’s still unanswered?
• Is there general agreement between different research groups in the main results and outcomes, or do different authors provide differing points of view and different conclusions?
• What are the key papers in your field that have had the biggest impact on the research?
• Have different publications identified similar weaknesses or limitations or gaps in the knowledge that still need to be addressed?

Structuring and Writing Your Literature Review

There are several ways in which you can structure a literature review and this may depend on if, for example, your project is a science or non-science based PhD.

One approach may be to tell a story about how your research area has developed over time. You need to be careful here that you don’t just describe the different papers published in chronological order but that you discuss how different studies have motivated subsequent studies, how the knowledge has developed over time in your field, concluding with what is currently known, and what is currently not understood.

Alternatively, you may find from reading your papers that common themes emerge and it may be easier to develop your review around these, i.e. a thematic review. For example, if you are writing up about bridge design, you may structure the review around the themes of regulation, analysis, and sustainability.

As another approach, you might want to talk about the different research methodologies that have been used. You could then compare and contrast the results and ultimate conclusions that have been drawn from each.

As with all your chapters in your thesis, your literature review will be broken up into three key headings, with the basic structure being the introduction, the main body and conclusion. Within the main body, you will use several subheadings to separate out the topics depending on if you’re structuring it by the time period, the methods used or the common themes that have emerged.

The important thing to think about as you write your main body of text is to summarise the key takeaway messages from each research paper and how they come together to give one or more conclusions. Don’t just stop at summarising the papers though, instead continue on to give your analysis and your opinion on how these previous publications fit into the wider research field and where they have an impact. Emphasise the strengths of the studies you have evaluated also be clear on the limitations of previous work how these may have influenced the results and conclusions of the studies.

In your concluding paragraphs focus your discussion on how your critical evaluation of literature has helped you identify unanswered research questions and how you plan to address these in your PhD project. State the research problem you’re going to address and end with the overarching aim and key objectives of your work .

When writing at a graduate level, you have to take a critical approach when reading existing literature in your field to determine if and how it added value to existing knowledge. You may find that a large number of the papers on your reference list have the right academic context but are essentially saying the same thing. As a graduate student, you’ll need to take a methodological approach to work through this existing research to identify what is relevant literature and what is not.

You then need to go one step further to interpret and articulate the current state of what is known, based on existing theories, and where the research gaps are. It is these gaps in the literature that you will address in your own research project.

• Decide on a research area and an associated research question.
• Decide on the extent of your scope and start looking for literature.
• Review and evaluate the literature.
• Plan an outline for your literature review and start writing it.

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Ten Simple Rules for Writing a Literature Review

Marco pautasso.

1 Centre for Functional and Evolutionary Ecology (CEFE), CNRS, Montpellier, France

2 Centre for Biodiversity Synthesis and Analysis (CESAB), FRB, Aix-en-Provence, France

Literature reviews are in great demand in most scientific fields. Their need stems from the ever-increasing output of scientific publications [1] . For example, compared to 1991, in 2008 three, eight, and forty times more papers were indexed in Web of Science on malaria, obesity, and biodiversity, respectively [2] . Given such mountains of papers, scientists cannot be expected to examine in detail every single new paper relevant to their interests [3] . Thus, it is both advantageous and necessary to rely on regular summaries of the recent literature. Although recognition for scientists mainly comes from primary research, timely literature reviews can lead to new synthetic insights and are often widely read [4] . For such summaries to be useful, however, they need to be compiled in a professional way [5] .

When starting from scratch, reviewing the literature can require a titanic amount of work. That is why researchers who have spent their career working on a certain research issue are in a perfect position to review that literature. Some graduate schools are now offering courses in reviewing the literature, given that most research students start their project by producing an overview of what has already been done on their research issue [6] . However, it is likely that most scientists have not thought in detail about how to approach and carry out a literature review.

Reviewing the literature requires the ability to juggle multiple tasks, from finding and evaluating relevant material to synthesising information from various sources, from critical thinking to paraphrasing, evaluating, and citation skills [7] . In this contribution, I share ten simple rules I learned working on about 25 literature reviews as a PhD and postdoctoral student. Ideas and insights also come from discussions with coauthors and colleagues, as well as feedback from reviewers and editors.

Rule 1: Define a Topic and Audience

How to choose which topic to review? There are so many issues in contemporary science that you could spend a lifetime of attending conferences and reading the literature just pondering what to review. On the one hand, if you take several years to choose, several other people may have had the same idea in the meantime. On the other hand, only a well-considered topic is likely to lead to a brilliant literature review [8] . The topic must at least be:

• interesting to you (ideally, you should have come across a series of recent papers related to your line of work that call for a critical summary),
• an important aspect of the field (so that many readers will be interested in the review and there will be enough material to write it), and
• a well-defined issue (otherwise you could potentially include thousands of publications, which would make the review unhelpful).

Ideas for potential reviews may come from papers providing lists of key research questions to be answered [9] , but also from serendipitous moments during desultory reading and discussions. In addition to choosing your topic, you should also select a target audience. In many cases, the topic (e.g., web services in computational biology) will automatically define an audience (e.g., computational biologists), but that same topic may also be of interest to neighbouring fields (e.g., computer science, biology, etc.).

Rule 2: Search and Re-search the Literature

After having chosen your topic and audience, start by checking the literature and downloading relevant papers. Five pieces of advice here:

• keep track of the search items you use (so that your search can be replicated [10] ),
• keep a list of papers whose pdfs you cannot access immediately (so as to retrieve them later with alternative strategies),
• use a paper management system (e.g., Mendeley, Papers, Qiqqa, Sente),
• define early in the process some criteria for exclusion of irrelevant papers (these criteria can then be described in the review to help define its scope), and
• do not just look for research papers in the area you wish to review, but also seek previous reviews.

The chances are high that someone will already have published a literature review ( Figure 1 ), if not exactly on the issue you are planning to tackle, at least on a related topic. If there are already a few or several reviews of the literature on your issue, my advice is not to give up, but to carry on with your own literature review,

The bottom-right situation (many literature reviews but few research papers) is not just a theoretical situation; it applies, for example, to the study of the impacts of climate change on plant diseases, where there appear to be more literature reviews than research studies [33] .

• discussing in your review the approaches, limitations, and conclusions of past reviews,
• trying to find a new angle that has not been covered adequately in the previous reviews, and
• incorporating new material that has inevitably accumulated since their appearance.

When searching the literature for pertinent papers and reviews, the usual rules apply:

• be thorough,
• use different keywords and database sources (e.g., DBLP, Google Scholar, ISI Proceedings, JSTOR Search, Medline, Scopus, Web of Science), and
• look at who has cited past relevant papers and book chapters.

Rule 3: Take Notes While Reading

If you read the papers first, and only afterwards start writing the review, you will need a very good memory to remember who wrote what, and what your impressions and associations were while reading each single paper. My advice is, while reading, to start writing down interesting pieces of information, insights about how to organize the review, and thoughts on what to write. This way, by the time you have read the literature you selected, you will already have a rough draft of the review.

Of course, this draft will still need much rewriting, restructuring, and rethinking to obtain a text with a coherent argument [11] , but you will have avoided the danger posed by staring at a blank document. Be careful when taking notes to use quotation marks if you are provisionally copying verbatim from the literature. It is advisable then to reformulate such quotes with your own words in the final draft. It is important to be careful in noting the references already at this stage, so as to avoid misattributions. Using referencing software from the very beginning of your endeavour will save you time.

Rule 4: Choose the Type of Review You Wish to Write

After having taken notes while reading the literature, you will have a rough idea of the amount of material available for the review. This is probably a good time to decide whether to go for a mini- or a full review. Some journals are now favouring the publication of rather short reviews focusing on the last few years, with a limit on the number of words and citations. A mini-review is not necessarily a minor review: it may well attract more attention from busy readers, although it will inevitably simplify some issues and leave out some relevant material due to space limitations. A full review will have the advantage of more freedom to cover in detail the complexities of a particular scientific development, but may then be left in the pile of the very important papers “to be read” by readers with little time to spare for major monographs.

There is probably a continuum between mini- and full reviews. The same point applies to the dichotomy of descriptive vs. integrative reviews. While descriptive reviews focus on the methodology, findings, and interpretation of each reviewed study, integrative reviews attempt to find common ideas and concepts from the reviewed material [12] . A similar distinction exists between narrative and systematic reviews: while narrative reviews are qualitative, systematic reviews attempt to test a hypothesis based on the published evidence, which is gathered using a predefined protocol to reduce bias [13] , [14] . When systematic reviews analyse quantitative results in a quantitative way, they become meta-analyses. The choice between different review types will have to be made on a case-by-case basis, depending not just on the nature of the material found and the preferences of the target journal(s), but also on the time available to write the review and the number of coauthors [15] .

Rule 5: Keep the Review Focused, but Make It of Broad Interest

Whether your plan is to write a mini- or a full review, it is good advice to keep it focused 16 , 17 . Including material just for the sake of it can easily lead to reviews that are trying to do too many things at once. The need to keep a review focused can be problematic for interdisciplinary reviews, where the aim is to bridge the gap between fields [18] . If you are writing a review on, for example, how epidemiological approaches are used in modelling the spread of ideas, you may be inclined to include material from both parent fields, epidemiology and the study of cultural diffusion. This may be necessary to some extent, but in this case a focused review would only deal in detail with those studies at the interface between epidemiology and the spread of ideas.

While focus is an important feature of a successful review, this requirement has to be balanced with the need to make the review relevant to a broad audience. This square may be circled by discussing the wider implications of the reviewed topic for other disciplines.

Rule 6: Be Critical and Consistent

Reviewing the literature is not stamp collecting. A good review does not just summarize the literature, but discusses it critically, identifies methodological problems, and points out research gaps [19] . After having read a review of the literature, a reader should have a rough idea of:

• the major achievements in the reviewed field,
• the main areas of debate, and
• the outstanding research questions.

It is challenging to achieve a successful review on all these fronts. A solution can be to involve a set of complementary coauthors: some people are excellent at mapping what has been achieved, some others are very good at identifying dark clouds on the horizon, and some have instead a knack at predicting where solutions are going to come from. If your journal club has exactly this sort of team, then you should definitely write a review of the literature! In addition to critical thinking, a literature review needs consistency, for example in the choice of passive vs. active voice and present vs. past tense.

Rule 7: Find a Logical Structure

Like a well-baked cake, a good review has a number of telling features: it is worth the reader's time, timely, systematic, well written, focused, and critical. It also needs a good structure. With reviews, the usual subdivision of research papers into introduction, methods, results, and discussion does not work or is rarely used. However, a general introduction of the context and, toward the end, a recapitulation of the main points covered and take-home messages make sense also in the case of reviews. For systematic reviews, there is a trend towards including information about how the literature was searched (database, keywords, time limits) [20] .

How can you organize the flow of the main body of the review so that the reader will be drawn into and guided through it? It is generally helpful to draw a conceptual scheme of the review, e.g., with mind-mapping techniques. Such diagrams can help recognize a logical way to order and link the various sections of a review [21] . This is the case not just at the writing stage, but also for readers if the diagram is included in the review as a figure. A careful selection of diagrams and figures relevant to the reviewed topic can be very helpful to structure the text too [22] .

Rule 8: Make Use of Feedback

Reviews of the literature are normally peer-reviewed in the same way as research papers, and rightly so [23] . As a rule, incorporating feedback from reviewers greatly helps improve a review draft. Having read the review with a fresh mind, reviewers may spot inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and ambiguities that had not been noticed by the writers due to rereading the typescript too many times. It is however advisable to reread the draft one more time before submission, as a last-minute correction of typos, leaps, and muddled sentences may enable the reviewers to focus on providing advice on the content rather than the form.

Feedback is vital to writing a good review, and should be sought from a variety of colleagues, so as to obtain a diversity of views on the draft. This may lead in some cases to conflicting views on the merits of the paper, and on how to improve it, but such a situation is better than the absence of feedback. A diversity of feedback perspectives on a literature review can help identify where the consensus view stands in the landscape of the current scientific understanding of an issue [24] .

Rule 9: Include Your Own Relevant Research, but Be Objective

In many cases, reviewers of the literature will have published studies relevant to the review they are writing. This could create a conflict of interest: how can reviewers report objectively on their own work [25] ? Some scientists may be overly enthusiastic about what they have published, and thus risk giving too much importance to their own findings in the review. However, bias could also occur in the other direction: some scientists may be unduly dismissive of their own achievements, so that they will tend to downplay their contribution (if any) to a field when reviewing it.

In general, a review of the literature should neither be a public relations brochure nor an exercise in competitive self-denial. If a reviewer is up to the job of producing a well-organized and methodical review, which flows well and provides a service to the readership, then it should be possible to be objective in reviewing one's own relevant findings. In reviews written by multiple authors, this may be achieved by assigning the review of the results of a coauthor to different coauthors.

Rule 10: Be Up-to-Date, but Do Not Forget Older Studies

Given the progressive acceleration in the publication of scientific papers, today's reviews of the literature need awareness not just of the overall direction and achievements of a field of inquiry, but also of the latest studies, so as not to become out-of-date before they have been published. Ideally, a literature review should not identify as a major research gap an issue that has just been addressed in a series of papers in press (the same applies, of course, to older, overlooked studies (“sleeping beauties” [26] )). This implies that literature reviewers would do well to keep an eye on electronic lists of papers in press, given that it can take months before these appear in scientific databases. Some reviews declare that they have scanned the literature up to a certain point in time, but given that peer review can be a rather lengthy process, a full search for newly appeared literature at the revision stage may be worthwhile. Assessing the contribution of papers that have just appeared is particularly challenging, because there is little perspective with which to gauge their significance and impact on further research and society.

Inevitably, new papers on the reviewed topic (including independently written literature reviews) will appear from all quarters after the review has been published, so that there may soon be the need for an updated review. But this is the nature of science [27] – [32] . I wish everybody good luck with writing a review of the literature.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to M. Barbosa, K. Dehnen-Schmutz, T. Döring, D. Fontaneto, M. Garbelotto, O. Holdenrieder, M. Jeger, D. Lonsdale, A. MacLeod, P. Mills, M. Moslonka-Lefebvre, G. Stancanelli, P. Weisberg, and X. Xu for insights and discussions, and to P. Bourne, T. Matoni, and D. Smith for helpful comments on a previous draft.

Funding Statement

This work was funded by the French Foundation for Research on Biodiversity (FRB) through its Centre for Synthesis and Analysis of Biodiversity data (CESAB), as part of the NETSEED research project. The funders had no role in the preparation of the manuscript.

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All candidates for the PhD Degree are admitted on a probationary basis. A student's status with the Student Registry is that he or she will be registered for the CPGS in Computer Science . At the end of the first academic year, a formal assessment of progress is made. In the Department of Computer Science and Technology, this takes the form of a single document of no more than 10,000 words in length, exclusive of tables, bibliography and appendices.

The document is principally a PhD Proposal . That is, a document that demonstrates a clear path from the candidate's current position to a complete PhD thesis at the end of the third year. The document has two purposes: (i) to help the candidate to reflect on and plan their research project and (ii) to allow the Computer Laboratory to assess the student's progress and planned research.

In the document, the candidate should do the following:

• Identify a potential problem or topic to address for the PhD.
• identifying the seminal prior research in the topic area
• the most closely related prior work, and
• their strengths and weaknesses.

The goal is to show the limitations (or lack) of previous work. One method that could be employed to do this is to provide both a taxonomy of prior work and a gap analysis table: a table whose rows are the closest related work, the columns are the desired attributes of the solution, and each table entry is a Yes or a No. This would then clearly show that no prior work meets all the desired attributes.

This section of the document might be expected to form the basis of part of the candidate's final PhD thesis.

Candidates should have already done some preliminary research. This may be early attempts at proofs, a detailed analysis of existing methods, a critique of existing systems, assembly and testing of investigative apparatus, conduct of a pilot experiment, etc. This section of the document may form the basis of a chapter of the final PhD thesis. It is common for the candidate to have produced an academic paper (even if this is a minor paper for a workshop, for example), where they are the main author. The paper does not need to have been published, but the assessors should be able to see that it is of potentially publishable quality. Such a paper can be submitted as an appendix to the document; in this case the material in the paper should not be reproduced in the document, but should be summarised briefly in a self-contained way.

This should indicate, at a high level, the research that might be undertaken in the second and third years of the PhD. It needs to show that there is a viable route to a thesis in two years' time. In particular, it must state the specific research question or questions that are being addressed. If there are more than one question being addressed, it needs to be made clear how they are interconnected and how answering them would result in a coherent thesis story. They need to also be accompanied with a brief discussion of why they are important and interesting questions that are worthy of a Cambridge PhD, and why they are new (the gap analysis table could be used for this). Next, the candidate needs to describe the proposed method of attacking the questions, for example, by listing the major steps to completion through the next two years.

Some candidates find it useful to structure this as a cohesive one-page summary of the proposed thesis, with a tentative title, a paragraph setting the context, and three or four paragraphs describing chunks of the proposed research, each of which could be the basis for an academic paper and each of which could be expected to be a chapter of the final thesis. The chapters should make a cohesive overarching narrative of the thesis, rather than be stand-alone pieces of work.

A paragraph identifying criteria for success is recommended where the candidate explains how they will convince the research community that their approach is successful.

Potential risks are recommended to be identified: what could derail this methodology (technically) and if this happens what is plan B?

• Timeplan: provide a detailed timetable, with explicit milestones for each term in the next two years against which the candidate will measure their progress. This would ideally include technical tasks that are planned to be accomplished during each time chunk.

It is essential that the supervisor(s) agrees that the document may be submitted. The document will be read by two other members of staff (assessors), who will interview the student about the content of the document in a viva. It should therefore give sufficient information that the assessors can satisfy themselves that all is well. It is expected that the interview will take place before the end of the first year.

Submission deadlines (electronic)

• For students admitted in Michaelmas Term, by June 30, 23:59
• For students admitted in Lent Term, October 30, 23:59
• For students admitted in Easter Term, by January 30, 23:59

All submissions should be made electronically via the filer.

Electronic version (in PDF format) should be provided via the PhD report and thesis upload page . This deposits uploaded files on the departmental filer at /auto/anfs/www-uploads/phd = \\filer.cl.cam.ac.uk\webserver\www-uploads\phd.

Students intending to take up research placements during the vacations which begin on, before, or shortly after the submission deadlines must submit their report one month before departure to enable the examination process to be completed before the internship begins . No other extensions will be permitted unless otherwise authorized by the Secretary of the Degree Committee.

Oral examination

The student will be invited to discuss the documents with two assessors appointed by the student's principal supervisor. Neither of the assessors should be the student's principal supervisor though one may be the student's second advisor. Occasionally, the principal supervisor may be invited to clarify elements of the PhD Proposal and to attend the viva as an observer.

Where the initial PhD Proposal document is unsatisfactory, the assessors must ask for a revised submission and arrange a further discussion. Where the PhD Proposal is acceptable, it may still help the student to record suggested modifications in a final version of the Proposal. A copy of the revised document must be submitted to the Secretary of the Degree Committee.

The PhD Proposal document is internal to the Laboratory. However, since it is the basis for formal progress reports including registration for the PhD Degree and those made to funding bodies, assessors should endeavour to arrange a meeting where the documents should be assessed and discussed by the end of the student's first year at the latest. The Secretary of the Degree Committee should be informed of the result by the assessors and by the supervisor on the Postgraduate Feedback and Reporting System as soon as possible thereafter.

The report will be considered by the Degree Committee which will make its recommendations on the registration of the student to the Board of Graduate Studies.

In those cases where the student's progress is wholly inadequate, the supervisor should give them a written warning by 15 September (or the appropriate corresponding date - 15 December or 15 March) that they are in danger of termination, with copy to the Secretary of the Degree Committee.

The word limit is a maximum; it is not a target. Successful PhD Proposal documents can be significantly shorter than the limit. Writing within the word limit is important. It is part of the discipline of producing reports. When submitting reports (and the final PhD thesis), students will be required to sign a Statement of Word Length to confirm that the work does not exceed the limit of length prescribed (above) for the CPGS examination.

Originality

Attention is drawn to the University's guidance concerning plagiarism. The University states that "Plagiarism is defined as submitting as one's own work that which derives in part or in its entirety from the work of others without due acknowledgement. It is both poor scholarship and a breach of academic integrity." The Faculty's guidance concerning plagiarism and good academic practice can be found at https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/exams/plagiarism.html .

Reports may be soft-bound in comb-binding or stapled.

Secretary of the Degree Committee September 2013, updated September 2021, updated March 2022

Department of Computer Science and Technology University of Cambridge William Gates Building 15 JJ Thomson Avenue Cambridge CB3 0FD

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Welcome to the research world! - My first PhD annual progress review

"The week has been chockers!", let me just quote what my supervisor said today, as the last week of November finally came to an end and we embraced the many nerve-racking moments that we went through in the past month and year, as we prepare to wind down for end of year.

From thesis students completion, final exam and finalizing marks for a class, the end of the year has been all about assessment. The most important moment for PhD students who begin their enrolment in the beginning of the year, is the annual progress review (APR) that usually takes place in the end of November. I am one of those PhD students, so the most important thing about this week was I have successfully gained the confirmation!

Yes, the confirmation is the term given to the first year PhD students who have successfully gone through the first 9 months of candidature, including completion of all the mandatory writings and trainings, and these are assessed in the review meeting. The goal of this review meeting is to discuss about candidates' progress and research plans and also serves as the opportunity for candidates and supervisors to raise any issues that might be impacting their research. Before attending APR, students are also required to attend workshops to be informed about what are expected from a candidate in order to receive a satisfactory outcome. 

In my university (UNSW), candidates ideally has 1 APR meeting every year for 3-4 years of their candidature. The third one is usually the final meeting that determines timely completion and thesis submission according to the projected date. The outcome of each APR meeting will be decided by the panel whether the student achieved satisfactory, marginal or unsatisfactory progress. An unsatisfactory outcome means that the next review will be held within 3 or 6 months instead of within a year to make sure that the student get all the support and resources they need to complete their thesis.

The APR meeting is organized by the school's postgraduate coordinator (this is what is like in biomedical Engineering, UNSW, Sydney). For each candidate, a panel are assigned which consist of 3 academic staffs that may hold different position (professors or associate professor or lecturer) or have different research field/background. One month before the APR, the school sends a calendar invite and information about the meeting, and forms that the candidate and panel require to complete. In my university, a first year PhD student is required to also complete and submit a bunch of documents to be assessed by the panel include:

• Literature review (average is of 30-50 pages)
• Research proposal (containing a shorter literature review as background, then justification of research, aims, methods, and plans for the next 4 years)
• Milestones (Year 1 milestones and activities done to achieve them, and milestones for Year 2. Average of 4 key milestones is usually enough as it is better to not overestimate your available time and resources)
• Proof documents (e.g. email or screen shots) of completion of mandatory workshops and courses such as research integrity, research data management, data storage, student welcome and orientation
• Proof of completion of mandatory coursework such as writing courses, or research essentials

So, when all the documents are gathered a month prior to the schedule APR meeting, the student must complete a review form through the GRIS ( Graduate Research Information System ) platform. GRIS is where candidates information and progresses are managed. The forms that candidates need to complete ask about students research aim, achievement, weekly work hours, meeting and support from supervisor, and any issues that need to be resolved. The forms then get forwarded to the supervisor where they fill out similar information about the candidate. The whole form is completed by the panel on the day of APR with the outcome achieved by the candidate.

So, the way first APR meeting works in my school (Biomedical Engineering) follows this format: 

• 5 minutes welcome and introduction - where the chair introduces everyone in the panel and supervisory team
• 15 minutes presentation by the candidate - this is the opportunity for the candidate to really report about research progress, future plans and explaining mostly results achieved. For a first year candidate, it is important to have a strong, SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-based) milestones, that become the key performance indicator to be assessed in the following year. Important TIP: This is the most important aspect being assessed a a first year candidate, make sure that you are clear with your aims!
• 5-10 minutes discussion about research - this is where the panel asks about research background, data and the statistics, some science and justification for experiments. In this part, the candidate really wants to show in depth understanding about the research, that should reflect the wealth of knowledge one writes in their literature review.
• 5 - 10 minutes discussion between panel and the candidate alone - this is the opportunity to raise issues or ask for help outside the supervisory team
• 5 - 10 minutes discussion between panel and the supervisors alone -this is the opportunity for supervisor to report about the candidate

Since COVID-19 has forced all the review meetings to happen virtually (video conference), I had the privilege to attend my APR meeting at home and with a side note for presentation shown in my second monitor 😅. The meeting went very smoothly and the only hurdle was panel have to manage people leaving and joining back to the call during the individual discussion.  And I soon got notified of my satisfactory outcome and the panel report!

Anyway, what is the progress review meeting like in your university or school or faculty? And how are your experience in going through this process? I am very curious to hear about your experience in going through PhD review meeting and the differences. Share in the comment section below!

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Get a head start in the first year of your PhD

Even a marathon begins with first steps, and so it makes sense to master motivation, set healthy habits and get writing early to reap the reward of a polished dissertation at the end of the PhD journey, writes Andreï Kostryka

Andreï V. Kostyrka

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The first year of a PhD programme can be overwhelming. The success of a dissertation in many fields depends on the polish, iterations and revisions the research has undergone. So, what you do, what habits and routines you set up in the first year, will make a difference to the result at the end.

The first year is also crucial for learning – not least because neuroplasticity wanes as one grows older (as does the amount of time before the defence ). First-year doctoral students might be exempt from research-related events such as conferences, brown-bag seminars and faculty talks, yet there is no time for complacency.

Here are insider tips for making the most of the first 12 months. 

Start writing as soon as possible

Do not let provocative articles that explain how to write a PhD dissertation in three months delay the start of your writing. Unless you are John von Neumann or Paul Erdős (which you are not), it is impossible to write a proficient thesis in three or even six months.

• How to write an abstract for a research paper
• How to structure your PhD thesis
• What is your academic writing temperament?

Your early writing does not have to be grandiose or purposeful. It can begin with any thought related to your topic of study. In applied sciences, a good starting point is describing an output table or interpreting a few plots in simple language, as most applied research articles include a Discussion section where findings are explained in layman’s terms. If your work is more theoretical, any attempt at a derivation or a proof is valuable. Even a well-crafted email to your adviser can become the foundation stone. Generate as much material as possible, and you will have plenty to choose from for the thesis.

Iterations take time and effort. Reflection and re-evaluation are essential for shaping one’s ideas.

Give yourself the earliest opportunity to pick up the language appropriate for academia by receiving criticism and suggestions on your writing. Your first research poster will probably look amateurish, and your first empirical analysis will likely yield mixed conclusions – but this is not a cause for concern. Babies learn to walk by trying, falling, getting up and trying again.

Remember that chapters are not the endgame

Your PhD should reflect a deeper understanding of the subject, and this does not come overnight. It results from pumping large volumes of information into one’s head and allowing it to roam among the neurons.

Attend conferences, seminars and courses outside the university to hone your skills because the chapters are not the final goal. Presentations at informal seminars in front of one’s colleagues are a reliable way to build horizontal networks with postdocs, other students and specialists.

Keep a research diary

Document your methods, results and ideas in a research diary. If you are not writing the thesis in your native language, jot down ideas in your preferred language. A notebook of ideas is invaluable during meetings with your supervisor. It is easier for them to give feedback on clearly written statements.

Communication with your supervisor, positive or negative, can be a part of the research diary. It often takes extra effort to prove to a professor that their ideas need refinement. Reinforce your points with plots, tables and other printed material that will help you cast your mind back after a couple of years. Professors may lag behind the state of the art if the subject is outside their research interests – read the best practices in the field, take notes and share them during discussions.

Back up your work

Always make backups, even after small steps, because old versions and old results are valuable if you need to retrace your train of thought. The most convenient option is setting up a trustworthy cloud synchronisation service that automatically saves everything you write and stores multiple versions. If you do not trust those providers, synchronise your working folder with an external storage device every week or set up a self-hosted home cloud. Remember the 3-2-1 principle: have three versions of your data – two on different physical media and one on the server of your choice.

Work in small increments 

List small tasks for each day and set deadlines for yourself. It is normal to work harder on some days and make less effort on others. The flexibility of a PhD researcher’s job allows you to get the most out of your rushes of inspiration.

Punctuate stints of work with exercise breaks. Health directly impacts the clarity of thinking, so set a timer to stretch out and do sit-ups every hour (for example). There might be swimming pools, gyms or sports classes nearby. Student groups often organise collective events (like hiking or yoga) and provide free tickets for cultural events.

What to do when motivation flags

Other academic activities on campus may be more engaging than writing the thesis. With summer schools, conferences and workshops, it is easy to lose track of time and neglect your work. Writer’s block is another reason to postpone writing . Certain PhD students focus on teaching, believing that their foremost duty is to be helpful teaching assistants or exam invigilators.

Everything takes time, even if one considers Hofstadter’s law , which is why we present a list of tips on what to prioritise to free up time that would otherwise be wasted on non-thesis-related tasks.

• Write in plain text and do the formatting last. 
• Get a distraction-free plain-text editor that autosaves your input and restores it, even after a power outage.
• Type long passages instead of hand-writing to eliminate the need for retyping.
• Create figures using preferably free and open-source software; avoid relying on Microsoft Office.
• Use specialised software like JabRef or Zotero to arrange bibliographies and citations.
• Do not tolerate software quirks. Demand the right to install open-source tools from your IT team without needing support tickets.
• Do not try to solve bureaucratic or logistical problems outside your competence; there are non-research university personnel for those.

Writer’s block or frustration can result from stress. Being stuck at a certain point and without the courage to move forward is not uncommon in any job, including research positions. Should the stress pile up to the extent that it causes physical or mental unwellness, contact a healthcare provider and do not hesitate to book an appointment with a psychologist.

One possible remedy for writer’s block is switching to literature review. Prior reading is essential for smooth writing. The more you learn, the more you can say about the subject. Alternatively, you may try to process measurement data, prove a lemma, create a plot or engage in any other part of research that does not involve writing out words.

Finally, get enough sleep (at least on average). Force yourself to stop working in the evening and go home. If the crickets start chirping when you are still at your office, it is a sign to clock off.

Andreï V. Kostyrka is a postdoctoral researcher in the department of economics and management at the University of Luxembourg. 

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• Schools & departments

Writing your PhD First-Year Report

This course is intended for PhD students in their first year who are currently working on their First Year Report.

Course Content and Unit Aims

Content and Structure

• To compare the specific content requirements for your report with those of students from other schools and to identify common elements
• To examine to what extent these common elements are reflected in the Contents pages of sample student reports from previous years
• To start drafting the Contents page for your own report

The Introduction

• To explore what functional elements report introductions typically include and how they are typically organised
• To observe what elements are present in sample report Introductions and discuss reasons for the possible variations from the model
• To introduce useful language features that could be used in different parts of your Introduction
• To start drafting part or all of your Introduction

Literature Review

• To look at different ways of structuring a literature review
• To explore the different options available to you when referring to sources
• To introduce useful phrases and language structures that can be used when referring to sources
• To start drafting parts of your Literature Review

Criticality and Outlining Objectives

• To look at different ways of stating your aims and objectives
• To show how you can elaborate this section by summarising and justifying your chosen methods or approach
• Where appropriate, to start drafting part or all of an Objectives section
• To show you ways of expressing criticality in your writing

Future plans: proposed research design

• To look at different ways of presenting a research design
• To be made aware of different research design paradigms
• To introduce useful language that can be used to describe future research design
• To draft part of a research design

Individual Tutorials

• To allow students the opportunity to ask for clarification on issues arising from the course materials.
• To give students and tutor the opportunity for further discussion of tutor feedback.
• To provide suggestions for further English language / academic literacy development.

Course Days/times

• In-person – Wednesdays 10:00 - 12:00
• Online – Mondays 10:00 - 11:00 

The in-person course will be offered at both the Holyrood Campus and at Kings Buildings.

Teaching Methods and Learning Outcomes

Research students at the University of Edinburgh are required to submit a document - a report or proposal - towards the end of their first year to show that their research is proceeding satisfactorily. This course is designed to help you compose such a document.

The course materials include descriptions of the typical structure of the main sections of first-year reports, together with summaries of the typical language features frequently used in specific parts of the texts. We have also included excerpts from authentic first-year reports from a variety of disciplines for you to analyse. The course consists of brief introductory lectures and tasks related to different sections of the report/proposal.

Your tutor will provide you with feedback (focusing on overall clarity, style, and organisation) on the extended writing tasks, and meet you for a class once per week, either on-line or in-person, depending which option you have chosen.  You can expect to spend around 3 hours per week altogether to fully benefit from this course , including the written assignment and (for the online course) pre-reading of the course materials.

In the final week (week 6) of the course, you will have the opportunity for a one-to-one online tutorial with your tutor to discuss any remaining questions you may have.

By the end of the course students should have a better understanding of:

• ways of structuring the content of the report
• ways of organising the different sections of the report
• appropriate language for the different sections of the report and how to use that language accurately
• any specific language areas that will need further work.

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This article was published on 2023-11-23

Do you really want to publish your literature review? Advice for PhD students

Why publishing your literature review as your first paper may not be a good idea

Tatiana Andreeva - Sun 20 Jun 2021 08:20 (updated Wed 30 Aug 2023 10:03)

[Guest post by CYGNA member Tatiana Andreeva ]

Almost every PhD student I met had an idea that the literature review paper would be the first academic paper they publish. They thought of it being the first paper for two reasons - naturally literature review was the first stage of their PhD journey, but also they thought it was something relatively straightforward to do. To reinforce these ideas, in some PhD programmes I know publication of the literature review is routinely put as a milestone in the PhD progression plans.

At the same time, if you talk to academics who actually tried to publish a literature review, you would most often hear that it is a very challenging thing to do. Moreover, I recently realized that we rarely teach our graduate students how to do a literature review , let alone how to publish it . A weird mismatch, isn’t it? So, dear PhD students, I’d like to put some clarity around it for you. There are two key reasons why publishing literature review as your first paper may not be a good idea.

Not all literature reviews are made equal

First, the literature review you do as a first step of your PhD journey and publishable literature review are two different beasts: they have a different purpose, focus and audience.

The literature review you do as a first step of your PhD aims to inform you as a novice about existing literature and to help you identify an interesting research question or situate it better in the existing research landscape. You are likely to read different literatures and/or focus on different aspects, as you are trying to find your own research voice and space. As your PhD progresses and you get new ideas or unexpected empirical findings, you are likely to review the literature again (and again…)

Even if you do this literature review(s) following the best standards , it is very likely that parts of it will never be published – neither as a separate article, nor even as a literature review section of an empirical paper. Not because they are bad, but because they may end up being not so relevant for the final focus of your PhD. I know it is heartbreaking to discard pieces of work, especially our own writing, but if you think of them as steppingstones rather than final products, it becomes easier.  

In contrast, the literature review that is done for publication aims to inform others - many of whom are likely to be experts in the field - about something beyond existing literature and to propose future research agenda for them (and maybe for you as well, but it is not the main goal). Therefore, it needs a clear and single focus - on a specific research problem within a specific body of literature. And, if all goes well, it should be published – at least, that is the plan.

The table below briefly summarizes these ideas:

Easy publication of literature reviews is a myth

Another reason why I think that planning to publish a literature review as a first paper in the suite of PhD publications is not a good idea is: the notion that such papers are easy to publish is a myth! I think it is actually even more difficult to publish a literature review than an empirical paper.

In an empirical paper, you always have an element of uniqueness, which is your empirical data. Indeed, nobody has collected something like this so it is unique. Sometimes when your data is interesting, it could happen that reviewers come back to you and say: " you need to improve your theory and develop a much stronger positioning of the paper, but your data itself is very interesting, so we give you a chance for R&R ".

In my experience, this would never happen with a literature review paper – because your data is not unique, it is something that has been already written and published. Everybody, if they want, can access it. So with the literature reviews is really becomes critical that from the very start you have a very clear and strong idea of what is the problem that hasn’t been solved that your literature review solves, and what would be your theoretical contribution. This is a challenging task for everyone, not only for a PhD student, so it might be too risky to start from it your publication journey.

All that said, it does not mean that you cannot - or should not - do a literature review publication. Indeed, at some point it may stem from the literature review you did for your PhD. I hope that understanding the differences between these beasts may help you to master both – and plan your PhD publication portfolio better.

Related blogposts

• Resources on doing a literature review
• Want to publish a literature review? Think of it as an empirical paper
• How to keep up-to-date with the literature, but avoid information overload?
• Is a literature review publication a low-cost project?
• Using Publish or Perish to do a literature review
• How to conduct a longitudinal literature review?
• New: Publish or Perish now also exports abstracts
• A framework for your literature review article: where to find one?

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How to survive the first year of your PhD

Dec 14, 2020

Have you checked out the rest of  The PhD Knowledge Base ? It’s home to hundreds more free resources and guides, written especially for PhD students. 

Author: Danilo Di Emidio

‘Survival’ was the keyword during my first Ph.D year, in fact, five of us created a WhatsApp group aptly named ‘Ph.D Survivors’ as a prophetic sign.

Personally, I had not engaged with academic materials for almost 20 years, but the curiosity to go back into studying, being challenged intellectually, and learn more of a topic I was passionate about was strong enough to push me through the year.

No matter what your subject-specific journey is, a number of exciting challenges will await you: investigating new theories and practices, seeking out alternative answers, revitalising old research insights, and mobilising knowledge outside subject silos are all traits that bind together as the research progresses.

However, despite this initial trumpet blowing, the first year of a Ph.D is a different kind of beast when it comes to the day-to-day! There are often no lectures and seminars, no exam modules, no mid-week or end-week post-lecture and seminar reflections; there is only a long year ahead of you. You’d better use it constructively! 

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I’m now in my final Ph.D year and I’m so glad that, in that first year, I packed in as many research training courses as my University offered. More than I could possibly need, in fact.

So be selective! 

For example, I needed to merge speed-reading with effective-reading to reduce time spent on book chapters and journal articles that tended to pile up far too fast – with two kids to raise I had to stick to a strict timetable.

I needed to make my academic writing good enough again, if only not to bore my supervisor unnecessarily prolonged prose.

I also needed to confidently present my thesis’ aims in a short space of time, sometimes in as little as three minutes, to an audience of like-minded PhD students. Taking questions from those outside my department was the first learning curve; it humbled me without taking away my self-esteem.

So here is the key point : if your university offers post-graduate training courses then sign up for as many as you can. If they do not, then try to organise your own. Me and my peers used social media to create what we called our very own PPD (Ph.D Professional Development). It helped fill the skills gap we faced.

Your PhD thesis. All on one page.

Use our free PhD structure template to quickly visualise every element of your thesis. 

You may not see the added value of such alternative training straight away, but you will soon realise that the hardest thing in your second and third year is to see your social and academic life slowly reduced to the bare minimum. Therefore, those small circles of friends I made during those PPD sessions have always been available for support in later years.

After t hree of us came up with the PPD idea, we tested it amongst ourselves and then invited people to share research skills and tips to become more productive in our research. 

For example, we created one session that focused on paragraph structure in academic writing; as an ex-teacher, I shared a simple technique to condense points, give evidence, select examples and attempt evaluations. Others offered their IT skills to create an organised reference list. Others offered yoga and meditation sessions.

However, the point about PPD is that you don’t have to be an expert on something, your group may simply agree to share what is common practice for each of you and you will see how much you have to give (and take!). For example, a fellow Ph.D student reminded us of the importance of ‘foldering’. (the best advice I got from those sessions ), which involves you, from day one, separating your readings and writing into different e-folders as well as hard folders. It will save you considerable headache later on.

While such informal training is key to your first year and avoids you feeling too isolated, professional training sessions from your University will give you added purpose, as they structure your week’s timetable and make you look forward to something.

Always remind yourself that you are STILL learning, that a Ph.D is JUST the beginning of a potential career and all you have to show is that you have potential to be a re-searcher. Good luck and enjoy it!

Interested in group workshops, cohort-courses and a free PhD learning & support community? 

The team behind The PhD Proofreaders have launched The PhD People, a free learning and community platform for PhD students. Connect, share and learn with other students, and boost your skills with cohort-based workshops and courses.

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Grant Golub

June 3rd, 2020, reflections on the first year of my phd.

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

It is hard to believe the first year of my PhD programme is almost complete. It feels like just yesterday I was arriving in London to begin my degree. Adding to the surreal nature of the moment is the fact we have been under lockdown since March due to COVID-19. Since I am close to submitting my upgrade materials for my first year, I thought this would be a good time to reflect on my first year of the PhD at LSE.

As I’ve written in an earlier post, LSE is an ideal place to do a PhD because of its location in London, its world-class professors, and its proximity to countless archives and libraries . This has made it much easier to conduct research and prepare my dissertation as opposed to if I was at another university. I’ve been very privileged to have a wonderful supervisor who cares a lot about me and my work . Our conversations about my research have always been fruitful and give me new things to consider for the direction of my research. I have been very lucky to have such a hands-on supervisor.

One aspect of the PhD that I think many underestimate is how much work you actually do on your own . At LSE, like many British universities, there are one or two seminars you participate in to introduce skills you need for the PhD, but otherwise, you spend the bulk of your time individually conducting your research. During the first half of this academic year, I spent hundreds of hours reading articles and books on my topic to make sure I understood the literature. Around halfway through the year, I wrote my literature review based upon that reading, which helped me set my eventual dissertation within the broader literature on my topic.

After the holiday break, I began working on my upgrade chapter, which is an original piece of research we is required to submit as part of our upgrade dossier in June. At first, I spent a lot of time reading my primary source materials I had already collected and organised them so they were ready to go when I began writing. Around March, I started writing the chapter, which I have been continuously working on until now. At the moment, I am putting the finishing touches on it and will be submitting it in a few weeks. It will feel great to finally submit it!

T he first year of the PhD is a great time to read, think, and write before other responsibilities come into play . If you are going into your first year of a PhD next year, I would encourage you to read widely, strongly consider about where you will fit into the scholarship, and be bold in your arguments. Don’t be afraid to have a different viewpoint and make your case. After all, that is what academia is all about.

About the author

My name is Grant Golub and I'm a PhD candidate in the Department of International History at LSE. My research focuses on US foreign relations and grand strategy, diplomatic history, and Anglo-American relations.

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First year PhD

Hi, I am in my 10th month of my PhD. I have spent my first year doing a literature review and trying to get to grips with my topic (as I came straight from undergraduate and did not do a masters). I have kept a record of all the articles I have read and summarised each one. However when I compare what I have done to students just starting I feel like I am behind (for example a student who started 3 months ago is already starting to write her first 3 chapters of her thesis). What is normally expected of a student in their first year? My PhD is in the social sciences (management). Thanks.

Hi Vthebee, I wouldn't pay any attention to the person who is writing chapters 3 months in.  That sounds like they have already done work before they started the PhD, or what they are writing is not really chapters. The key aspect at your stage is that you have a research question!  This has to add to knowledge and do-able!). With your literature review, dont just review but find a gap in the literature that your research question answers.  By doable I mean you can answer it with your data. For example, you could research CEO's of top organisations but these people are very hard to get in touch with.  So you cant really answer your question. It would also help to have an idea of your general methodology. Are you doing qualitative or quantitative?  Potatoes

Hi Vthebee, I would reiterate what Potatoes has said. There is always going to be that 'annoying' person in the department that appears to be way ahead of you. Remember the PhD is at least 3 years of hard work, and as many people say, it should be treated as a marathon not as a sprint. Also, I would resist starting writing the thematic chapters/findings chapters of your thesis before you have completed a large bulk of your research. The thesis structure and content is likely to change quite a bit from how you envisage it to look at the moment. And, there is the danger that in producing chapters early on you become reluctant or resentful of changing them at a later stage (because you know how much time and effort they took). When I was at the stage you are now I was doing pretty much the things you have being doing; ploughing through the literature and making notes (I found it really useful to attach how my research supports/challenges/departs/adds etc to each of the pieces of literature I was consulting; doing the literature review, and treating it as a working document in that I went back to it (and still go back to it) making changes as and when I came across new literature/new avenues in my own research; thinking about methodology; and of course carrying out my research (which for me was mainly archival based and was a process I was still carrying out here and there well into my third year). By the time you enter second year, having laboured over the drier parts of the thesis i.e. the literature review, you might find (as I did) that you are really excited about finally writing about what you have found rather than what everyone else has found. Looking back now (3 and a bit years in) if I could have gone back to first year and changed anything it would have been that I was more organised in terms of indexing or organising all the work I have done - I now work with different folders and sub-folders on my computer (i.e. secondary literature, and then organising the pdfs, electronic notes etc  further into themes/ sub-disciplines etc). Using the electronic folders has been invaluable, because now when wriitng up it means I can use the search option in documents to retrieve all the information I have which mentions that particular theory, person, event etc. All the best :-)

Quote From vthebee: Hi, I am in my 10th month of my PhD. I have spent my first year doing a literature review and trying to get to grips with my topic (as I came straight from undergraduate and did not do a masters). I have kept a record of all the articles I have read and summarised each one. However when I compare what I have done to students just starting I feel like I am behind (for example a student who started 3 months ago is already starting to write her first 3 chapters of her thesis). What is normally expected of a student in their first year? My PhD is in the social sciences (management). Thanks. Dear Vthebee...this is how I feel at this moment.I also dont have Master and RISKYing myself to directly jump in PhD. I am now in my 7month of my PhD and I find i am struggling with the literature and sometimes I think to quit..How do you manage to survive??

Thank you all for your advice. Potatoes, it is comforting to hear that I am not the only person who has not started to write their thesis 3 months in. My general methodology will be qualitative, I'm not sure will this affect how I approach my Phd? One of the main problems I think I had is I had to change my supervisor about a month and a half ago so I feel a little lost. Wolfie27, thank you for your advice and reassuring words! I do try to keep my work organised in terms of keeping track of which articles I have read but I will divide this up further into themes and sub-themes as you mention. Your advice overall is really helpful and I will definately do what have you mentioned. Fafalia, I too thought about quitting but I know this is something I want to do and I try to stay motivated in this way. I guess I knew it wouldn't be easy when I started but I will take the advice of the others and just focus on my work and not compare myself to others. Thanks again all for your help, much appreciated.

======= Date Modified 01 Feb 2012 14:34:30 ======= Hi Vthebee, When doing qualitative you can expect that your research question will change.  As you read more literature and when you start analysing your data, the question you first thought was important may not be as important. Or something may come out of the data that you didnt expect to find.  It is still worth while having a few research questions written down. This will give you  a reason and focus for reading the literature and developing a methodology. Its also a different type of research question, maybe including 'how' or 'why'.  A question you should be asking yourself is how you are going to get access to data? Getting access is difficult! Its best to start thinking about that at 10 months in! Good luck with the PhD.  Cheers,

I spent the first year doing a literature review. Remember: whatever you are doing, do it well! I read and read, for 10 hours a day, every day, keeping detailed notes. My first draft was 120 pages, and included tables with detailed notes in each study, and comparative graphs among studies. I think I did a good job, and set very good fundation. I defined my research question, and unlike other students, I knew what I expected from my field surveys. I don't regret doing this massive job, (which was published) it makes everything so much easier later. Now, when I write a paper, I can easily say: The correlation between biscuit sales and flying penguins was particularly high, and similar results have been reported by Smartguy et al, 2008 and Nerdyguy, 2010. I can easily go back and see if my results agree with other research or not and why. I also think that I built a vocabulary and a better way to express myself scientifically. doing a focused literature review in the first year can only be beneficial. Just keep going. And don't compare yourself to other students!!!!!

I probably dont have that much to add, but am just saying hi and watching this thread with interest, as I am starting in 2 weeks, and so its useful to see what kind of goals/expectations other people had in their first year, and what they had accomplished. Im a Psych student, doing a topic I didnt really know much about until a couple of months ago, though I have done a bit of background reading. Im really hoping to have the literature review, and a proposal done by the middle of the year, as my uni won't give me any teaching work until thats done, and I would really appreciate a bit of extra cash! Im not sure how realistic that is though...

I had my 3 month viva yesterday (I am in the sciences and this is unique to my DTC), and one of my advisors said to me to stop worrying that I had no results yet: "For most science PhDs you get all the important results in the last year." I had to do a literature review for yesterday, however, it was a mini 5 paper option and my introduction chapter to my thesis (which I have not started) will cover the many papers I have skimmed over the last few months. I question if you can write 3 chapters in the first few months of your PhD - well I question whether it is worth it. By the end of three years you could have completely changed the direction of your PhD and that early work is wasted. However, making summaries of the papers you have read IS a good idea, and after reading your post I have realised I should be doing this. When it is chapter writing time I will have a summary with my thoughts and ideas of papers I can reference without having to reread in depth every paper. One thing I have started doing with my supervisor meetings is a handout of my latest work. E.g. 'Did this, it didn't work, why I think it didn't work, my idea what to do next / did this, it worked, this shows that, my idea what to do next / have read this paper, it makes me think this, can we show' Supervisor has a handout of where I am at, what I am doing. I have record to look back on the progress through the project ( like a facebook timeline!) and it focuses my ideas on what I have done and what to do next. These weekly handouts will be an ideas source when I start thesis writing as I will be able to follow research ideas through the 3 years and hopefully this will help write a logical argument why my PhD shows something at the end. 1st year: "What am I doing?" 2nd year: "I know what I want to do, how do I do it?" 3rd year: "Eek one year to prove my idea!"

Hi Vthebee, I am in a somewhat similar situation, as I am completing a PhD in an area that is not my background, so like you, I had to read a massive amount of literature and basically teach myself the foundations to the discipline, theoretical frameworks, etc. However, reading and reading and note taking often doesn't leave you with something that you can show as a finished product to your supervisor or committee, so it can leave you feeling a bit unproductive. I think it's important to look at this as a long road that you're not going to finish in a couple of months, and it's a road that is different for everyone. It sounds like you're doing a great job and situating yourself in the right spot. Once you get to the point of writing, you will have a strong foundation and understanding of the literature. I think for something like this, it's hard to set up common expectations and goals- you can't compare yourself to other students, as we all have different working styles and will experience different bumps and challenges along the way. And to be honest, I think 97% of graduate students feel they are behind and could be doing more- I think it's in our personality!

Hi to everyone who has replied to my post. It has been so helpful to read your posts, ideas and reassuring words! I can honestly say I will take the advice of everyone on board and I definately feel better about my situation, knowing that I am doing my best in my work and that I shouldn't compare myself to others (although its hard not too!) I really appreciate the time you have taken to answer my post.

Hi everyone, I am in the 7th month of my phd in the humanities. I am supposed to submit a chapter of my thesis and the literature review in 1.5 months for my qualifying exam(about 15000 words). I roughly have an idea as to what the chapter is all about however I have not written a single word in the past 3 months and I am seriously panicking with this massive procrastination to write issue. I am supposed to submit a draft to my supervisor which has yet to culminate. I am hoping to quickly get over this draft so that relations between my supervisor and I don't sour at the start of the programme and the feedback from the supervisor will be really useful.Can some advice I am at my wits end. Thanks

What advice do you really need? Get on with it! Now!

Quote From yanivo: Hi everyone, I am in the 7th month of my phd in the humanities. I am supposed to submit a chapter of my thesis and the literature review in 1.5 months for my qualifying exam(about 15000 words). I roughly have an idea as to what the chapter is all about however I have not written a single word in the past 3 months and I am seriously panicking with this massive procrastination to write issue. I am supposed to submit a draft to my supervisor which has yet to culminate. I am hoping to quickly get over this draft so that relations between my supervisor and I don't sour at the start of the programme and the feedback from the supervisor will be really useful.Can some advice I am at my wits end. Thanks I advise you to LISTEN to DocInsanity. He is our Drill Instructor!

I draw the line at physical violence (just) ;) Brilliant film that. Do you think there's a market opening for a Thesis Coach? PhD boot camp?

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• CAREER FEATURE
• 25 June 2024

How researchers navigate a PhD later in life

• Elizabeth Landau 0

Elizabeth Landau is a science writer based in Washington DC.

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

On a roll: Krista Bresock celebrates in her local skate park after graduating with a PhD in mathematics from West Virginia University, Morgantown, aged 41. Credit: Michael Germana

Krista Bresock sat crying in her professor’s office. She had to discuss one of five questions with her professor, in person. It was the concluding step of her final exam in functional analysis, the last course that she needed to complete for her PhD in mathematics. He’d shuffled a set of five cards, and she’d picked Card Number Two — corresponding to the one problem that she had not fully studied.

Unlike her fellow students studying intractable maths problems, Bresock was in her late thirties redoing coursework that she had failed years earlier. As a full-time maths teacher at West Virginia University (WVU) in Morgantown, she could find time to study only during nights and weekends.

“Problem Number Two was just collateral damage to being able to maintain this life of work full-time and be in grad school full-time,” Bresock remembers. She “fell to her knees” in relief when, a week later, she learnt she’d still got an A- in the course.

Many think of doctoral degrees as the domain of people in their twenties. Yet according to the US National Science Foundation, 17% of people who gained a PhD in science or engineering in the United States in 2022, the most recent year for which figures are available, were aged 36 or older . In some countries, including Colombia, Mexico, Portugal, South Korea, Iceland, Greece and Israel, the median age for entering a doctoral programme is 32 or higher, according to 2017 data from the OECD in Paris 1 .

Resources for mid-career scientists

A PhD requires a vast commitment of time and energy, often lasting five or more years. Stipends, when available, are often lower than salaries for other full-time jobs or professions. What’s more, students might have to move to another city, or even a different country, to attend their chosen course. Although difficult for any age group, those constraints can create different challenges for prospective students in their thirties, forties and beyond than for their younger colleagues.

At the same time, age often brings wisdom and self-confidence, qualities that can help older students to cope with a strenuous academic life. “The extra ten years that I was out doing other things gave me a lot of perspective and maturity to the way in which I think and live, and I think that was a big reason why I’ve succeeded,” says Peter Swanton, a 36-year-old graduate student working towards a doctoral degree in astrophysics at the Australian National University in Canberra.

Motivation is key

For Bresock, a doctoral degree represented “unfinished business”. She had struggled with alcohol and drug addiction from the age of 16, but hit a dangerous low point in early 2013, when she was a graduate student at WVU the first time round. She dropped out and checked herself into an in-patient programme, but still drank heavily afterwards. With the support of friends, family and Alcoholics Anonymous, she became sober in July 2013.

Bresock then taught maths at WVU, first as an adjunct and then as a full-time instructor, but she didn’t forget her incomplete doctorate. Finally, at the age of 37, she re-enrolled. “This little voice was like, ‘You have more to say. You have more to do. You have this thing sitting on the back burner that is kind of eating away at you,’” she says.

Despite her drive to finish the degree, motivating herself was “really hard sometimes”, she says, “because if I didn’t finish, no one would care: I would just not finish and still have this job and be fine.” One of her top tips for others looking to pursue a doctorate in mid-life is to fully understand and reflect on their motivations. If the goal is “more money”, that might not be enough, she says.

Before returning to his studies, Swanton held a variety of jobs, including hauling sugar cane, working in nightclub security and tutoring in secondary schools. He has this advice for anyone who’s considering a doctorate: make sure you’re “doing it because you love it”. For him, that has meant finding ways to combine telescopic investigations of cosmic objects, such as active galactic nuclei, with preserving folklore about the cosmos from the Gamilaraay, the people of his Aboriginal culture.

Peter Swanton, a 36-year-old graduate student in cultural astronomy at the Australian National University in Canberra, says that his previous work experience has given him the maturity to cope with the strains of academic life. Credit: Lannon Harley/ANU

Swanton’s heritage influences both his academic interests and the way in which he wants to communicate them. For example, the Gamilaraay language was originally a purely oral one. So, rather than just writing “a big block of text” for his dissertation, Swanton says that he would like to include elders and community members telling their own stories, and to bridge their knowledge with the Western understanding of the universe.

“My success has come down to finding something I am passionate about, and not concerning myself with future employability, which was the focus of my earlier attempts at academia and ultimately the reason why I didn’t succeed” at the time, he says.

Finding mentors

María Teresa Martínez Trujillo arrived at the Paris Institute of Political Studies to embark on a graduate programme in political science at the age of 32. Having spent her whole life up to that point in Mexico, she felt isolated from her classmates because of linguistic and cultural barriers, in addition to being the oldest student in her cohort. Martínez Trujillo had already had a career in the Mexican government, including working as an adviser to the secretary of the interior, yet she felt “less brave” than younger students, and had many more questions about reading materials.

She also felt ashamed about her lack of fluency in French. Over time, with the help of a therapist, she learnt to be less judgemental of herself and to overcome her impostor syndrome. Classmates helped her to proofread some of her assignments and she focused on improving her language skills.

Cultural and linguistic barriers left María Teresa Martínez Trujillo feeling isolated from her peers when she arrived from Mexico, aged 32, to embark on a graduate programme at the Paris Institute of Political Studies. Credit: Hiram Romero

Martínez Trujillo’s advisers — Hélène Combes and Gilles Favarel-Garrigues — were key for her as she dived into reading and fieldwork on the relationship between drug trafficking and the business world in Morelia, Mexico, for her master’s project. “They let me go to the ‘forest’ and spend time and lose myself,” she says, adding that when she felt lost or stuck, her advisers helped her to find her way.

Time and money

Finances often pose a problem for graduate students who don’t already have savings and support, including those who have worked previously. Even with tuition covered, and a stipend to help towards living expenses, making ends meet can be challenging, especially for students who have other financial responsibilities, such as providing for family members or maintaining a home.

Martínez Trujillo received a stipend, but she spent almost all of it on rent and didn’t want to ask her family for money. She worked as a nanny, consulted for a Mexican think tank and spent summers working in Mexico on friends’ projects. “I’d never have free days,” she says.

Bresock wishes she could have spent more time away from both work and studies. “I did a terrible job of that. Make sure you make time for yourself. That dissertation will still be there, if you go take a walk, or if you go swim or whatever, for an hour out of your life.”

Training: Data Analysis: Planning and Preparing

Like Bresock, Marc Gentile kept a full-time job while doing his PhD in astrophysics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne in his mid-to-late-fortiess. He needed to earn enough to support both himself and his wife, and to address other financial responsibilities.

“The top advice would be establishing effective work and study habits right from the start,” he says. “In my case, time was the most precious resource, and I had to be very well organized to make the most of it.”

Gentile would work on his doctoral assignments from 5 a.m. to 6 a.m. each weekday, before leaving for his day job. He would then read articles while commuting by train, and tackle more PhD tasks or further reading in the evenings. “I was told that I was, on average, more productive and better organized than most other, younger students, because you develop such skills when you work professionally,” he said.

Family matters

When Wendy Bohon walked across the stage to receive her doctorate in geology, she was nearly 38 years old and pregnant with twins. She wound up at Arizona State University in Tempe after beginning her career as an actor, and then becoming fascinated with earthquakes after one shook her apartment in 1999.

For her dissertation, Bohon conducted fieldwork in India on two large fault systems, focusing on how fast they had been moving, their intersections and their frequency of earthquakes — as well as the growth of mountains around them — over the past 34 million years. Today, she heads the Seismic Hazards and Earthquake Engineering branch of the California Geological Survey in Sacramento.

Wendy Bohon was nearly 38, and pregnant with twins, when she graduated from Arizona State University in Tempe with a PhD in geology. Credit: Linda Bohon

As a student, her desire to expand her family had put her in a different life stage from younger peers. She had met her husband, who already had a young daughter, while in her graduate programme. And whereas her classmates had wanted to avoid pregnancy, she had struggled to conceive. “That emotional disconnect and the difference in their reality and my reality — it was really tough,” she says. Ultimately, she and her husband chose to try the intensive process of in vitro fertilization, which Bohon mostly kept secret. At the same time, she was helping to co-parent her husband’s daughter, and the couple were given full custody of the girl when she was seven.

Bohon coped with parenting and finishing graduate school with the help of “a built-in village of people around who could step in to help us”. Other graduate students would play the card game UNO with the girl, or colour pictures with her. And Bohon’s mentor, along with the mentor’s husband, became the child’s godparents.

“In a lot of ways, it was easier to parent during my PhD, because my schedule was relatively flexible, so I could stay home with her when she was sick, or attend school functions,” Bohon says. What’s more, she adds, “having a kiddo that needed me helped me to set and keep healthier boundaries than I think I would have otherwise”.

Charlotte Olsen, a postdoctoral researcher in astrophysics at the New York City College of Technology, earned a PhD at the age of 42 and now investigates the factors that influence star formation and galaxy evolution. Olsen says that working on her doctorate presented challenges for her marriage. “I’m not gonna lie: grad school is really rough on a relationship,” she says — adding that, especially at the beginning, “it’s an incredibly stressful time”.

Among the responsibilities that older students might have is taking care of ageing parents. Olsen recalls that during her qualifying exams, she hadn’t heard from her mother, who was 76 years old at the time, for a while. She assumed that her mother wanted to give her space during that stressful time. Later, she found out that her mother’s appendix had ruptured, necessitating surgery and a stay in a hospital’s intensive-care unit.

Through it all, Olsen’s spouse was an invaluable source of emotional support. “Having somebody who is there with you along the way” helps a lot, she says.

What happens next?

Not everyone who gets a PhD stays in their field. Gentile, now 60, works as a data scientist for a Swiss television station. He had a postdoctoral research position for five years after graduation — but for several reasons, including financial ones, he could not find an academic job afterwards. “If I had really wanted to continue in astrophysics, then I would have had to move abroad; it’s difficult now,” he says.

Still, Gentile found the PhD experience rewarding and worthwhile. As well as acquiring problem-solving techniques, he learnt coding and data-science skills, such as machine learning and statistical methods. And he has used all of these in subsequent jobs, including his current one.

His graduate work also remains relevant. Some of the algorithms and software that he worked on during his PhD helped to inform the tools that scientists will use to analyse data from the European Space Agency’s Euclid observatory, which aims to explore dark energy and dark matter.

Bresock received a promotion at West Virginia University after earning her PhD in maths in December 2022, aged 41. Her dissertation examined how students understand the definite integral, a fundamental concept in calculus, when solving different kinds of problem.

Today, she has greater empathy for her own students because of her own struggles as a graduate student. Finishing her doctorate remains one of her most satisfying accomplishments, she says. “When people ask me what’s the biggest thing I’ve ever done in my life, it’s: get sober, and then, finish my PhD. That’s a close second.”

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-02109-x

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Education at a Glance 2019: OECD Indicators (OECD, 2019).

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• Published: 27 June 2024

Jaffe-Campanacci syndrome; a case series and review of the literature

• Ahmed O. Sabry 1 ,
• Ahmed Salem Abolenain 1 ,
• Noureldin Mostafa 1 ,
• Abdelraouf Ramadan 1 &
• Mohamed Ghanem 1  

BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders volume  25 , Article number:  502 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

Metrics details

Jaffe-Campanacci syndrome is a rare syndrome, characterized by multiple non-ossifying fibromas (NOF) and cafe-au-lait patches. The name was coined in 1982 by Mirra after Jaffe who first described the case in 1958. Although it’s suggested there is a relation with Neurofibromatosis type 1, there is still no consensus on whether Jaffe-Campanacci syndrome is a subtype or variant of neurofibromatosis-1(NF-1).

Case presentation

In this article, we present a case series of 2 patients. The first case is a 13-year-old male with Jaffe-Campanacci syndrome who presented with a distal femur fracture. His father had positive features of both Jaffe-Campanacci syndrome and NF-1, while his sister only had features of NF-1, so we presented both.

Jaffe-Campanacci has a clear relationship with type 1 neurofibromatosis, which still has to be genetically established. Due to the presence of several large non-ossifying fibromas of the long bones, it is linked to a significant risk of pathological fractures. We concur with previous authors, that an osseous screening program should be performed for all patients with newly diagnosed type 1 neurofibromatosis, to identify non-ossifying fibromas and assess the potential for pathological fracture. Moreover, siblings of patients with NF-1 should be screened for multiple NOFs that may carry a high risk of pathological fractures.

Peer Review reports

Jaffe-Campanacci syndrome (JCS) was first demonstrated in the literature in 1958 [ 1 ]. Since then less than 30 cases have been reported [ 2 ]. JCS generally presents with café-au-lait macules, central giant cell granulomas of the jaw, and multiple non-ossifying fibromas. Other features include cardiovascular malformations, mental retardation, cryptorchidism, and hypogonadism [ 3 ].

A 12-year-old Egyptian boy presented to our emergency room with acute right distal femoral pain, swelling, and an inability to bear weight, after falling to the ground earlier on the same day.

Upon examination, there was marked tenderness, ecchymosis, and deformity over the right distal femur with an inability to move his knee due to pain. X-rays showed a fractured right distal femur over a bone lesion that’s multiloculated, radiolucent with sclerotic rims consistent with a non-ossifying fibroma (NOF). The radiographs also showed a similar lesion in the proximal tibia on the right side. A full skeletal survey was done and a similar lesion was discovered in the left distal femur (Fig.  1 ).

Showing an X-ray of the right femur fracture over the NOFs. A lesion in the proximal tibia is also seen

No lesions of the vertebral bodies or mandible were detected. MRI of the knees showed an eccentric, well-defined, metaphyseal, cortico-medullary lesion that causes cortical thinning with no soft tissue invasion. The lesion has a low intensity on T1 and an intermediate T2 signal, with a peripheral low signal rim corresponding to the sclerotic border (Fig.  2 ).

MRI of the NOF in the distal femur and proximal tibia. The Distal femur is surrounded by effusion due to the fracture

Upon further examination of the body, about 20 café au lait macules were scattered over his face, chest, abdomen, back, and limbs, with the highest density around the back and abdomen (Fig.  3 ).

Photo shows scattered café-au-lait macules over the boys body

The boy had multiple axillary, inguinal freckles, a short stature being below the 5th percentile for his age, a relatively large head, and suffered from hypogonadism, thus the patient was diagnosed to have JCS. No cutaneous neurofibromas or lisch nodules were detected. Ophthalmologic examination showed no significant findings.

Skin traction was done in the emergency room and the patient was admitted to the ward for preparation for surgery of open reduction and internal fixation of the distal femoral fracture. The patient was taken into the preoperative holding area where he was side-marked. He was later moved into the operative room. Second generation cephalosporins were given to the patient IV according to pre-operative protocol. General anesthesia was administered smoothly via an endotracheal tube without complications. He was placed in a lateral position on his right side. A straight 7 cm incision was done over the lateral aspect of the thigh with dissection of subcutaneous tissues, then an incision through the iliotibial band was done. The vastus lateralis muscle was elevated from the distal femur using two bone levers, the fracture site was exposed and reduction was done by traction and fracture manipulation, fixation by a locking T-plate was done and placed above the physeal growth plate, the wound was irrigated with saline and a drainage tube was placed, closure was performed in anatomical layers the iliotibial band was sutured using vicryl 0 then the subcutaneous layer was closed with vicryl 2/0 running sutures and finally the skin was closed using monocryl 3/0 subcuticular sutures. A sterile dressing was placed over the sutured incision. An X-ray was done after the operation (Fig.  4 ) the drain was removed after 2 days, and the patient was discharged. The patient started protected weight bearing after 6 weeks and follow-up x-rays showed union on the 12th week where he started full weight bearing (Fig.  5 ).

Post-operative xray after reduction and fixation of the pathological fracture

Postoperative xray showing union and calcification of the NOF’s

Second case

The boy's father, a 32-year-old gentleman, upon general examination, showed almost 30 cafe au lait macules over his body, axillary and inguinal freckles, and multiple cutaneous neurofibromas spread over his body, nape, and face (Fig.  6 ).

Photo of the fathers back with multiple café-au-lait macules and neurofibromas

He was short in stature. Ophthalmologic examination showed no significant findings. A skeletal survey showed healed calcified non-ossifying fibromas in the distal femur of both knees (Fig.  7 ).

X-ray of the father shows healed NOF in the right and left distal femur

He gave a history of having a Ventricular septal defect to which he underwent surgical repair when he was 7 years old and didn’t have a history of past fractures. The father's skeletal survey showed residues of healed non-ossifying fibromas. Further history revealed the father saying his mother had similar dark-colored skin lesions and bumps. One of his sisters and a brother out of his 5 siblings also had similar skin lesions. He said his brother who had these skin lesions suffered from a fracture when he was young from a trivial fall, suggesting it could have been a pathological fracture, but we couldn’t obtain any imaging. The father said he had another 4 step-brothers from his father and none of them had these lesions, suggesting that the syndrome could have been inherited from his biological mother.

The boy's sister from the affected father, a 9-year-old girl, also showed multiple Café-au-lait macules (CALMs) over her body and axillary freckling (Fig.  8 ). She had a single subcutaneous neurofibroma over her neck. She had short stature compared to her age with mild cognitive disability.

Showing café-au-lait macules

Interestingly, her skeletal survey showed no non-ossifying fibromas, hence she couldn’t be diagnosed with JCS.

Consent to publish

The patients and their guardians (Both father and mother) gave their consent for publication of their case study and scientific dissemination of the non-identifiable clinical and radiological images as a case report to medical literature in an open access journal, in the form of informed and written consent.

Clinical presentation

To our knowledge, this is the first case of JCS recorded in Egypt and the second in the Middle East following a case reported in Qatar in 2005 [ 4 ].

The prevalence of non-ossifying fibroma is still unknown, as the majority of cases are asymptomatic; however, the estimated percentage is 30 to 40% of children and adolescents according to the 2020 WHO classification of tumors of the bone [ 5 ]. On the other hand, multiple NOFs are much less common, and their association with NF-1 is infrequent. Moser et al. found only 72 cases (8%) with multiple NOFs in a series of 900 patients with NOFs, from which only 4 cases (0.4%) were associated with NF-1 [ 6 ].

Non-ossifying fibromas are mainly diagnosed based on radiographic findings. On X-rays, they present as multiloculated, lucent lesions with a thin sclerotic rim, eccentrically located in the metaphysis near the physis. In MRI, NOFs exhibit a high or intermediate T2 signal, with a peripheral low signal rim corresponding to the sclerotic border. As NOFs mature, they may calcify, leading to opacity within the lesion. In MRI, the signal becomes lower on both T1 and T2 sequences [ 5 , 7 ].

Diagnostic challenges

JCS can be differentiated from NF-1 when spotting multiple non-ossifying fibromas with multiple café-au-lait macules in the absence of cutaneous or nervous neurofibromas [ 1 , 3 ] However, several authors have studied the overlap between JCS and neurofibromatosis type 1 suggesting that JCS is a special subtype of NF-1 [ 3 ]. Our first case has signs suggesting JCS as described by Mirra et al. being presented with a pathological fracture, with some signs of NF-1 and being stunted with average height below the 5th percentile for his age and sex and also hormonal disturbance in the form of hypogonadism [ 8 ]. The second case is the father of the first case who was found to have multiple CALMs, axillary freckles, stunted growth multiple cutaneous neurofibromas, and healed NOFs which suggests the inheritance of NF-1 gene sequence from father to son. The detailed history of the second case revealed a mother (who is a grandparent of the first case) who had CALMs and cutaneous neurofibromas, and four siblings with CALMS suggesting that we have a family with different variants of NF-1 one of them is our first case with JCS. The third case is the sister of the first case and the daughter of the second case. She shows multiple CALMs and axillary freckles, mental retardation, and stunted growth, however, she has a single cutaneous plexiform neurofibroma and a free skeletal survey. The previous pattern of case series hints at the autosomal dominant inheritance of NF-1 and that JCS is just a special subtype of NF-1 as suggested by Colby et al. and Baumhauer et al. [ 9 , 10 ].

Genetic basis

Baumhoer et al. performed DNA sequencing on 59 patients with non-ossifying fibromas (NOFs). They identified mutations in three genes: KRAS, FGFR1, and NF1. Specifically, KRAS mutations were found in 64% of patients, suggesting somatic mutations due to the lethality of germline KRAS mutations. FGFR1 mutations were detected in 14% of patients, also considered somatic as the germline mutations are associated with osteoglophonic dysplasia. NF1 mutations were observed in 2 cases (3.39%). Polyostotic NOFs, which are rarer, showed an association with neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1) and JCS [ 11 ].

Stewart et al. studied 14 JCS cases and found somatic NF-1 mutations in 13 of them. These 13 cases met the NIH criteria for neurofibromatosis-1 [ 12 ]. Colby emphasized the correlation between neurofibromatosis-1 and multiple NOFs, recommending radiographic surveys [ 9 ].

Management strategies

Being most commonly occurring in the distal femur and proximal tibia, Colby and Saul suggested doing radiographs of both knees for patients suspected to have JCS [ 4 ]. However, they can be located in other regions of the upper limbs and diaphysis of long bones. Thus, a skeletal survey is recommended to spot all missed and skip lesions. Being more susceptible to pathological fractures, Jaffe Campanacci patients with NOF in the distal femur are better managed operatively by prophylactic fixation according to many authors [ 3 , 6 , 8 ]. Campanacci et al. suggested that more than half of the cases suffer at least one fracture throughout their lifetime [ 3 ]. Hence, we recommend that diagnosed patients engage in proactive strategies to avoid trauma, thereby reducing the likelihood of fractures.

Hau et al. reported a case of a fifteen-year-old patient with JCS when excision, curettage, allograft strut-grafting, and plate fixation were done. Healing occurred six months post-operatively [ 13 ]. Chen Yang et al. performed intralesional excision and allograft grafting, but, instead of rigid fixation, they adopted restricted weight-bearing for three weeks. Bone union was achieved after six months [ 14 ]. These findings suggest that healing at the sites of the bone lesions was not impaired. In our case, we adopted open reduction and internal fixation without grafting. Complete bone union was achieved after 6 months.

JCS is not the only syndrome overlapping with NF-1. Some other syndromes overlap with NF-1 as Neuro-cardio-facial dysmorphism which is characterized by mental retardation or cognitive dysfunction, congenital heart defects, facial dysmorphism [ 15 ], and legius syndrome which is characterized by CALMS, macrocephaly, skin freckles, cognitive disorder and short stature [ 16 ].

Patient and family education plays a vital role by explaining the benign nature of NOFs, the associated conditions and the need for regular follow-up. Radiographic findings should be described to patients and their families, along with instructions on symptom recognition and pain management. Genetic counseling is essential, as it may be passed on to children as shown in this study. Lastly, psychosocial support acknowledges the emotional impact of chronic conditions. This can be helped by connecting patients with support groups and counseling.

Literature review

Authors searched literature using many literature databases including Medline, the web of science, Google Scholar, and the Egyptian knowledge bank databases. All relevant papers had their references searched as well for related articles. The present review encloses all case reports on Jaffe-Campanacci syndrome. A total of 31 unique studies from all databases were identified. English-language articles that reported case reports and series were included, which narrowed down the included articles to 12 (Fig.  9 ). Details of the cases are listed below in Table  1 .

Prisma chart of the included studies

Eighten of the reported 27 cases were males (66.667%). Out of the 27 reported cases, only 11 had been reported if they had a family history of similar lesions or NF-1 or not. 3 cases (37.5%) were found to have a positive family history where at least one parent had either JCS or NF-1. The majority of cases, 17 (62.96%) out of 27 cases, had their first presentation as a pathological fracture. This could be because most cases remain undiagnosed as JCS and don’t do radiographs until they suffer from a fracture.

Complications and long term outcomes

Despite a high association of pathological fractures over the NOFs [ 3 ], these lesions tend to regress as the patient reaches skeletal bone maturity [ 12 ]. Giant cell granulomas tend to appear in the second to third decade of life and may cause facial asymmetry and dental malocclusion. There is a documented association with systemic abnormalities which includes cryptorchidism, hypogonadism, ocular abnormalities, cardiovascular abnormalities and intellectual disabilities [ 18 ]. Multidisciplinary management is essential for addressing the orthopedic, dental and systemic challenges associated with this syndrome.

Future directions

For future research directions in the study of JCS, it’s essential to explore the genetic basis of the condition further. This includes investigating the potential hereditary nature of the syndrome through a comprehensive familial analysis and history.

JCS is characterized by its multiple non-ossifying fibromas, Cafe-au-lait macules, and axillary/inguinal freckling and usually is accompanied by symptoms of NF-1. This case series suggested that JCS may be a variety of NF-1 as it shows there may be autosomal dominant transmission similar to NF-1 along with its manifestations. These cases are likely to present with at least one fracture on top of NOF lesions and hence need evaluation follow-up and assessment of cortical thinning over NOF especially in high weight-bearing bones such as the femur and tibia.

Availability of data and materials

Data is provided within the manuscript and presented on request. The data regarding the studies included in the systematic review is present as part of the manuscript and is present in Table  1 .

Abbreviations

Café-au-lait macule

Fibroblast growth factor receptor 1

Jaffe-Campanacci syndrome

Kirsten rat sarcoma virus

Magnetic resonance imaging

Not available

Neurofibromatosis-1

Non-ossifying Fibroma

World Health Organization

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A.O.S took the lead in writing the manuscript and case report. A.O.S, A.S.A, A.R, M.G and N.M helped in acquisition of the data and following up the case. A.S.A and A.R shared their experience and helped in writing and revising the work. All authors reviewed the manuscript and approved it for publication.

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Sabry, A.O., Abolenain, A.S., Mostafa, N. et al. Jaffe-Campanacci syndrome; a case series and review of the literature. BMC Musculoskelet Disord 25 , 502 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12891-024-07581-0

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TuTh 3:30-4:45 p.m.

Drs. Michael S. Nagy and Graham Wrightson

Modern society’s fascination with mythology manifests itself in the continued success of novels, films and television programs about mythological or quasi-mythological characters such as Hercules, the Fisher King, and Gandalf the Grey, all of whom are celebrated for their perseverance or their daring deeds in the face of adversity. This preoccupation with mythological figures necessarily extends back to the cultures which first propagated these myths in early folk tales and poems about such figures as Oðin, King Arthur, Rhiannon, Gilgamesh, and Odysseus, to name just a few. English 492, a reading-intensive course cross-listed with History 492, primarily aims to expose students to the rich tradition of mythological literature written in languages as varied as French, Gaelic, Welsh, Old Icelandic, Greek, and Sumerian; to explore the historical, social, political, religious, and literary contexts in which these works flourished (if indeed they did); and to grapple with the deceptively simple question of what makes these myths continue to resonate with modern audiences. Likely topics and themes of this course will include: Theories of myth; Mythological Beginnings: Creation myths and the fall of man; Male and Female Gods in Myth; Foundation myths; Nature Myths; The Heroic Personality; the mythological portrayal of (evil/disruptive) women in myth; and Monsters in myth.

Likely Texts:

• Dalley, Stephanie, trans. Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others. Oxford World’s Classics, 2009
• Faulkes, Anthony, trans. Edda. Everyman, 1995
• Gregory, Lady Augusta. Cuchulain of Muirthemne: The Story of the Men of the Red Branch of Ulster. Forgotten Books, 2007
• Jones, Gwyn, Thomas Jones, and Mair Jones. The Mabinogion. Everyman Paperback Classics, 1993
• Larrington, Carolyne, trans. The Poetic Edda . Oxford World’s Classics, 2009
• Matarasso, Pauline M., trans. The Quest of the Holy Grail. Penguin Classics, 1969
• Apollodorus, Hesiod’s Theogony
• Hesiod’s Works and Days
• Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Homeric Hymns
• Virgil’s Aeneid
• Iliad, Odyssey
• Apollonius of Rhodes Argonautica
• Ovid’s Heroides
• Greek tragedies: Orestaia, Oedipus trilogy, Trojan Women, Medea, Hippoolytus, Frogs, Seneca's Thyestes, Dyskolos, Amphitryon
• Clash of the Titans, Hercules, Jason and the Argonauts, Troy (and recent miniseries), Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?

ENGL 492.ST1 Science Writing

Erica summerfield.

This course aims to teach the fundamentals of effective scientific writing and presentation. The course examines opportunities for covering science, the skills required to produce clear and understandable text about technical subjects, and important ethical and practical constraints that govern the reporting of scientific information. Students will learn to present technical and scientific issues to various audiences. Particular emphasis will be placed on conveying the significance of research, outlining the aims, and discussing the results for scientific papers and grant proposals. Students will learn to write effectively, concisely, and clearly while preparing a media post, fact sheet, and scientific manuscript or grant.

Graduate Courses

Engl 575.s01 creative nonfiction.

In this course, students will explore the expansive and exciting genre of creative nonfiction, including a variety of forms such as personal essay, braided essay, flash nonfiction, hermit crab essays, profiles, and more. Through rhetorical reading, discussion, and workshop, students will engage published works, their own writing process, and peer work as they expand their understanding of the possibilities presented in this genre and the craft elements that can be used to shape readers’ experience of a text. Students will compile a portfolio of polished work that demonstrates their engagement with course concepts and the writing process.

ENGL 592.S01: The Vietnam War in Literature and Film

Engl 704.s01 introduction to graduate studies.

Thursdays 3-5:50 p.m.

Introduction to Graduate Studies is required of all first-year graduate students. The primary purpose of this course is to introduce students to modern and contemporary literary theory and its applications. Students will write short response papers and will engage at least one theoretical approach in their own fifteen- to twenty-page scholarly research project. In addition, this course will further introduce students to the M.A. program in English at South Dakota State University and provide insight into issues related to the profession of English studies.

ENGL 792.ST1 Grant Writing

This online course will familiarize students with the language, rhetorical situation, and components of writing grant proposals. Students will explore various funding sources, learn to read an RFP, and develop an understanding of different professional contexts and the rhetorical and structural elements that suit those distinct contexts. Students will write a sample proposal throughout the course and offer feedback to their peers, who may be writing in different contexts, which will enhance their understanding of the varied applications of course content. Through their work in the course, students will gain confidence in their ability to find, apply for, and receive grant funding to support their communities and organizations.