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Nathan

Reviewing Literature

Daily Post

Your examiners are interested in your research, your thesis and you as the researcher who did it all. Bound up in all of that is your familiarity with the literature of your discipline. You don’t need to have read every paper before you got started. You don’t need to remember every detail of every paper or book you’ve read over the years of your PhD journey.

Your examiners expect familiarity. They expect a certain general understanding. And they expect a particular understanding of the works you’ve used and cited.

They don’t expect perfection though! Talk with your supervisors and your colleagues to get a sense of what might be expected.

Beyond that focus on the literature that has made a big difference. If you could recommend ten papers for someone to read to understand your topic what would they be? What paper was most influential for you and why?

 

PS: I explore more of what to expect from examiners and the end of the PhD in the latest issue of Viva Survivors Select. The Survival Issue contains twenty posts from the archive plus new writing on surviving the viva, working through the PhD journey and being ready for the challenges of the viva.

Nathan

Where Did I Hear That…?

Daily Post

I listen to a couple of podcasts quite regularly – The Tim Ferriss Show and Revisionist History are both favourites of mine – and on one recently I heard someone say something that lodged in my head as being quite useful:

Regular review readily resolve random readings.

Ironically, I can’t remember where I heard this! But it is definitely good advice. I lost track of the number of times during my PhD where I thought, “Oh, I know this, now where…” and just couldn’t find the reference. You are hopefully doing better than me. You are hopefully managing your references well.

As you’re preparing for your viva, think about how you can summarise your key references. Think about how you can make a good overview of the key points of your argument and your results. You have a lot of this floating in your head, but if you systematically review what you’ve done and where it comes from the information and ideas will be easier to access. Make time to review things several times. It doesn’t have to be every day, but consider making it a habit.

Think about how you might do all this in a way that works for you – then do it.