Co-writing a paper, especially beyond one or two co-authors, can become a protracted process. If, on top of that, you try to have multiple feedback cycles (as we recommend), co-authoring a paper can feel like swimming in molasses. This brief post describes how the most effective PhD students I know handle this kind of feedback situation.

In a PhD (and as doctoral supervisors) we often face situations where we feel blocked, with no idea of how to get out or what to do next. In this post, the first of a series distilling wisdom from the latest round of “A Happy PhD” workshops, we look at a peer advice technique we have repeatedly use in the workshops to help students (and supervisors!) unblock. All you need is… a little help from a small group of people.

In recent times I’m having the fortune of seeing several of my own doctoral students approach the end of the doctoral journey (yes, it does end!). As they submit the dissertation and prepare for their defense, there is one piece of advice I find myself giving again and again, about how to tackle the impossible task of presenting multiple years of research work in less than one hour. In this post, I describe a “presentation design pattern” for thesis defenses, which builds upon classic conceptualization exercises advocated in the blog.

Do you feel like the prose of your papers is burdensome and rambling, even after lots of outlining and feedback? Do you often get feedback from co-authors about it being ambiguous, aimless or vague? Do you keep making the same writing mistakes again and again? The final step in drafting a paper (generating final prose and editing it sentence-by-sentence for clarity) is laborious and often overlooked. In this short post, I point you to a set of proofreading/editing tips from another blog, and share with you one tip to help you detect those pesky errors and make your prose more punchy.

After a long hiatus for personal reasons, we are back in business! Continuing from our last post from 2021, here I highlight one of the blog’s big foci for this starting year: the “big PhD questions”. The post goes over what Google has to say about this (!) and asks for your ideas and opinions on what big questions about the doctorate we should investigate next at the “A Happy PhD” blog.

If you are reading this, chances are that you have already decided to do a PhD. Yet, you may know someone who is considering a doctoral degree (or you may be offering such a position as a supervisor to prospective students). This post is for them. In this new type of post, we will look at big questions facing any PhD student. Today, we analyze the question that precedes all the other big PhD questions: “should I do a PhD?”. Below, I offer a couple of quick, simple ways to look at this important life decision, and a list of 10 factors to consider when offered (or seeking) a PhD position.

During a PhD (or any research) we need to answer not only the research questions we have set for ourselves, but also a host of other questions. Many of them are reflective and/or open in nature. Yet, we often slap whatever answer first pops into our brains, and run with it. In today’s “quickie” post, I share a simple practice that can help in getting over this availability bias to get deeper, better answers to your open reflective questions.

Doctoral Consortia are events (often, at scientific conferences) where doctoral students present their dissertation ideas and get expert feedback on them. I have co-organized a few of these events during the first waves of the pandemic, which students seemed to find useful (the events, not the pandemic!). In this post, I describe the (online) event format that we followed, in case it helps future organizers of similar events. If you are a PhD student, I hope this post will also encourage you to attend one!

Have you ever had this feeling, while writing, that your prose is leading nowhere? that right now it would be a great moment to defreeze the fridge? to check your phone, because someone may have texted? In this post, I offer a simple exercise to use next time these internal interruptions assail you during writing.

Have you ever spent hours providing feedback over a colleague’s (or a student’s) paper? And have you ever found afterwards that many of your carefully-crafted, thoughtful comments had been ignored? In this “quickie” post for supervisors (or for anyone giving internal feedback), I share a small trick that I use lately to avoid these situations… and get better outcomes for everyone involved.

Have you ever gone out of a supposedly important meeting, after more than one hour of talking, but still feeling like a poor (or obvious) decision has been made? In this post, I go over a simple pattern to organize more effective meetings when a group decision or proposal has to be made. Don’t be fooled by its simplicity: it’s much more effective than “business as usual” meetings, but people (including ourselves) will resist it fiercely, because it feels unnatural to act against our internalized meeting routines.

What can we do, when we have to take a hard decision about the PhD (like changing supervisors or leaving doctoral studies altogether) but we don’t really know which way to go? In the continuation to last week’s post, we see how to go about the actual decision-making, to choose the option that has the best chances to satisfy us in the long run.

In the PhD (and beyond), we sometimes face a difficult situation, and we have to take a hard decision: do I leave my PhD? do I take an unrelated job to earn more money while I try to finish the PhD? do I seek a new supervisor that better supports me? do I accept the change of direction that my supervisor is suggesting? In this two-part post series, I will not give the answer to those hard questions, but rather provide a decision process that can help us find the option that is right for us, in our particular circumstances.

We tend to think of research as rational, mechanistic, sterile, orderly. However, there are many things about research that are random, chaotic, and require loads of creativity (writing papers being only one example among many). Thus, it sometimes makes sense to think about research as an art… and sometimes we can reuse tricks and advice from the arts, to make better science. In this brief post, I give you a couple of those, from a well-known artist and writer, in the form of two Monday Mantras.

Defining who are the authors of your scientific papers, while apparently trivial, is sometimes a surprisingly difficult decision (especially, the first times we do it). As novice researchers, we may operate under conjectures or assumptions about how scientific authorship works, which may not necessarily be true. In this post, I go over several factors that often weigh in into that decision, and I provide a couple of tips and resources about how I would go about taking that decision, ideally.

Along with writing your first journal paper, doing a substantial revision to your manuscript upon receiving the reviewers’ comments is one often-cited painful moment of any doctoral process. This complex act of scientific communication involves balancing diplomacy with integrity, creativity and systematicity. In this post, I go over the concrete (and, sometimes, counter-intuitive) steps I follow to revise my journal papers upon receiving peer-review critiques, as well as some basic principles to increase your chances of success and avoid unnecessary suffering.

Writing research papers is one of the most dreaded (and most unavoidable) activities for many people during the PhD. In this series of posts I explore some of the reasons why writing research papers is difficult when one arrives at the PhD, and explain what concrete writing process I find myself following after more than a decade of academic writing.

Going to an international conference, to present your own work or to better understand a scientific community, is usually an intense (even stressful) experience. As a doctoral student, probably even more so. In this post I share a selection of advice and tricks to make your next conference more pleasant (and useful in the long-term). Go forth, and enjoy a few days of “geeking out” with fellow researchers!

As a Ph.D. student, you very often have to present what your research is about. Maybe you want to get quick feedback from a visiting professor. Or you need to give a talk at a conference or doctoral consortium. In this post, I go over a technique adapted from a large US research lab I once visited. I will walk you through its simple four- (or five-)part structure, including real examples from my own work.

One would think that research, as the pursuit of new knowledge, is mostly based upon curiosity. However, the daily grind of research life can erode that sense of excitement students have about delving into the unknown. In this post, I explore the role of curiosity in doctoral studies, and look at a few practices and tricks to keep the flame of curiosity alight (without burning the village!).

The writing of a paper (or the dissertation itself) is often a long process, along which many decisions are made: should I send my ideas for feedback now, or generate more polished text? should I think of the target journal now or decide once I have the finished draft? et cetera. To finish this mini-series of posts on writing (why writing papers is hard, how I write papers, and the second part of that writing process), I review here the main principles and lessons that I have learned after more than 10 years of writing scientific papers. I hope they help you navigate these decisions if you are in doubt, or if you have to step out of the usual writing process due to unexpected events.

Writing a paper is one of the hardest, but most creative parts of a Ph.D. Very often, we do not know where to start, what to do at what point, or when to get feedback from our collaborators. In a previous post, I started describing in detail the process I normally follow to write my scientific papers. This post explains the rest of the process, from the outlining until you send your manuscript off to the journal/conference. One would think that this is straightforward, just scribbling and scribbling, right?

There is plenty of advice out there on how to write academic publications, from general stylistic tips to field-specific guides. Yet, I’ve found most of that advice tends to be abstract, or focused on the final product, never giving you a step-by-step account of the process. In this post, I share the writing process I find myself using after 70+ academic publications. This will give you an idea of where to start writing your paper (especially if you have never written one), and it will show you that all polished papers have humble (even crappy) origins. Kill perfectionism, and the dreaded “academic writer’s block” will eventually disappear.

Writing (papers or the dissertation itself) is one of the activities that many doctoral students hate the most. Why is this act of communication so difficult for us? As a prelude to my post on “how I write papers”, I expose some misconceptions we seem to have about scientific writing and what are good ways to learn it.

By far, this is the tool (as in, “thinking tool”) which I recommend most often to PhD students. This diagram summarizes your main research questions, thesis contributions and evidence of their usefulness. While painful to make, this brutal synthesis exercise is also a powerful communication tool. In this post, I explain how it works, its origins, and how making 18+ versions of it helped me through my PhD. Copy the provided template and use it in your PhD supervision meetings or even in the PhD defense!