campusreview. com. au workforce
What are some of the most common tech tools PhD students can use to support their research process? There aren’ t many, but what are the ones they are taking advantage of? The main technology implements made available to students from university are bibliographic tools. [ These help you ] search for research papers, journal articles and the like, and can also store data about pieces of research that you find.
One of the biggest problems for PhD students is conducting that paper literature search. [ They’ re ] looking for the latest information on their particular field of inquiry and then reading it, making notes and working to understand what’ s going on. In other words, they’ re becoming an expert in a particular field.
So the main tools [ in use ] are bibliographic, and some of these are called discussing research. Products like Mendeley or ResearchGate or Academia. edu, which allow researchers to communicate with one another. They’ re LinkedIn-type tools for researchers and they are popular.
Could you outline some of the key challenges or hurdles PhD students face that could be addressed by incorporating different types of technologies into the process? Managing all the information is one of the biggest challenges. Being able to collect that range of information and organise it, read it, mark it up and [ take notes on it ]. Also, being able to reference that information when we do write. One of the major measures of performance for a PhD is publication. We need to be able to reference all that material accurately.
Because most tools are so old, they’ re of different chapters of their thesis. That becomes cumbersome and difficult. You can lose things, you get corrupted files, and you’ ve got editing time – the challenges are quite enormous.
All the tools we’ re using for this are fragmented. You have to decide what is going to work for you or not. In a lot of ways, we then [ end up falling back ] on our easiest option, which is to do things manually.
It causes productivity problems. If you’ re not being productive, if you’ re not feeling like you are getting somewhere, then you start losing interest, you start losing motivation, and all of these things contribute to our dropout rate. It’ s most unfortunate. A single integrated platform that provides all the necessary tools for research students would make life a whole lot easier.
We run little workshops for PhD students and training sessions and things like that, but we’ re not sophisticated with our support infrastructure.
EndNote or Zotero. However, [ these ] have been around for [ about 20 ] years. And they’ re technical products designed for information gathering 22 years ago as opposed to today.
Universities tend to buy [ bibliographic tools, as they are at the heart of academic work ]. But, they’ re old fashioned. They don’ t capture an understanding of the information that’ s out there today. For example, they call a journal article that you might find online an electronic article or an electronic book. Well, you can find almost anything online these days, and you don’ t necessarily call it electronic.
So as we’ re trying to become experts in our field, there is a problem. [ We need to ] gather all this information, we have to store it, we may have to manage it, we have to read it, we have to make notes about it. But we don’ t have the tools that support that very well.
The primary tool of choice for writing is Microsoft Word. There again, it’ s 22 years old. It’ s not integrated with the bibliographic products; you have to plug things together.
Then there are other analytic tools. We’ ve got a few more modern [ instruments ] that have come along recently around not able to do accurate referencing. That means they end up becoming a basic storage bin and most of the referencing ends up being done manually. Each discipline has different standards for referencing requirements, so this becomes a major, major challenge.
Another challenge for PhD students is designing their research program in the first place – understanding the whole concept of a thesis and a research question, which is essential.
Project and time management and writing, drafting and re-drafting all their work [ are all critical skills ] because [ the thesis they hand in ] reflects their journey to becoming an expert in their field. It presents their understanding of that field and what is known about it, along with their ideas.
Communication in written form is the primary output. We have to review the student’ s work and students look forward to receiving evaluation from their mentors. You’ ve got that whole mentoring process.
In this process, at the moment, I send a file to my supervisor or a student will send one to me. I read it, mark it up and send it back. The student then ends up with version after version after version
How can universities help facilitate an enhanced use of technology within the PhD process? The main thing is about integrating – becoming more student centred. What is it that students are doing and how are they doing it? What is the process from beginning to end?
At the moment, a lot of the universities are just running small workshops here and there – it’ s very fragmented. All our technology is fragmented.
[ It would help if you could ] pull the whole process together from end to end – from the beginning of the research to the drafting, the polishing, the feedback, the collaborating, the writing and the publishing. [ Making ] the student feel like their workflow is managed in a single environment would be the most beneficial thing universities could do to enhance the process for PhD students, and enhance their success.
[ Doing so would ] provide key support. And with 25 per cent of students ending up dropping out, it’ s a costly exercise for everybody [ as it is now ].
More and more, what the government wants is for us to increase our [ number of ] research students, bring more research into the business world and feed our PhD students into industry, because they’ ve got advanced skills that industry needs. They are innovative. They have the ability to be creative, the ability to solve problems. These are all things PhD students learn on their journey – critical advanced skills we need in today’ s high-tech industries. n
37