January 2015 – The Bristol Doctoral College Blog

Ten thousand papers a month

Posted on 28 January 2015 by Doctoral College

Nick Jones is a second-year postgraduate researcher in the School of Mathematics. His research is rooted in physics and the problem of understanding how a large number of interacting particles behave. Particularly interesting is the case where the emerging cooperative behaviour of the whole system is very different to that of the smaller pieces that make it up.

Most of the days that I spend working on my PhD, I am at my desk (which, incidentally, has a pretty great view over Clifton). There, I’m usually confronted by a web browser with so many tabs open that you can’t read the names. Most of them have the same icon though: the ‘smily face and crossbones’ of arXiv.org – a website where many researchers post preprints of their articles, as well as lecture notes and other such useful things. One thing you realise during your studies is just how much information is out there, and what a challenge it is to find the thing you need: at the end of last year arXiv passed one million new papers since its 1991 inception. Initially, the papers were in one sub-field of physics and there would be about one hundred papers added per month. Since then it has grown to cover physics, mathematics and computer science as well as quantitative subfields of other sciences, with almost ten thousand new papers each month! It is a fantastic resource; with many scientists making their work available for everyone to read, including those readers who don’t have the journal subscriptions that I get through the Bristol library. Other fields have similar preprint servers, and not every physics paper appears on arXiv, but some idea of the quantity of new work can be gained from the graph below. Most of the growth you see is in adoption of arXiv by a subfield, but note that hep-* (the high energy physics category) has had a relatively constant submission rate for the past few years, so the number you see is probably about the size of the active field. This works out at about twenty five papers per day, so a lot to keep track of!

With so much research being done it can be difficult to stay on top the field your project sits in. One way is to meet people at workshops and conferences (and stay in touch – they might write to you with something interesting!), but if you are at the office you will need to keep track of articles on the internet. If the field is moving quickly, you will have to keep an eye on the preprints in case something you need appears and to make sure you don’t end up doing research that would have been new at the start of the year but has now been done somewhere else. Equally, if there is less activity in your field, it’s easy to stop looking for new publications and then you are guaranteed to miss developments. And of course, these are just the new papers, you also need to know what is already out there! Thankfully, the internet makes life easier, but sometimes a bit of luck helps too. In an effort to make sure I didn’t miss anything new I signed up for the ‘scientific recommendation engine’ Sparrho. You put in keywords that you are interested in and then it will check all kinds of websites (including, of course, the arXiv!) for articles. You then tune it by choosing which of these you consider relevant. After putting in three words that I thought most appropriate for my research project and playing around for five minutes it came up with a paper from 2013 that is exactly what I needed and which I could easily have never found! Since then I have been using it to keep tabs on new papers in my field, although I haven’t had another such breakthrough from (recent) history.

Right, you’ve got your doctorate. Now what?

Posted on 21 January 2015 by Doctoral College

I don’t know how common this is, but I gave no thought to ‘post-PhD’ when I started out. I was mostly interested in the field and wanted to see if I had what it took to do a doctorate. Job thoughts came later, with an academic career emerging as the frontrunner by several lengths. I love my area of research, I really enjoy teaching, and there’s no ceiling as to how far you can develop intellectually. I had a good job for a time before I started my postgrad studies – interesting, well paid, international travel, nice people – but after a while I wasn’t getting any better, just learning more facts. The next options for me were to go into management or get involved in more advanced kinds of research. It was a no-brainer: I had to go back to university.

So, here I am, with my PhD, and looking at the job market. It looks like getting from a freshly passed viva to a lecturing post requires having a few things on your CV:

A doctorate;
Research experience (in addition to your doctorate);
Teaching experience;
Conference presentations;
Journal publications, and preferably a book;
Successful research funding bids;

I’ll go through the list, in principal and in (my) practice.

You didn’t always have to have a PhD/professional doctorate but you probably do now. It might not be as important in some subjects like nursing, teacher training, or architecture, but having one in those will certainly not count against you. In most subjects, though, it’s a case of no doctorate, no entry. For me, that’s a check.

Getting research experience – preferably as part of a research team – seems to be pretty important. Not many have the opportunity to do this before their doctorate and you can’t always squeeze it in during. You might get to be involved in other people’s work if you’re in a lab in your research group, but this is not an option for everyone. Teaching is readily available if you’re studying in a department that has undergraduate students, less if you’re not. I had a career in non-academic research before I came back to university, managed to get a few cameo research jobs during my PhD, and am now working on a research project. My department was a graduate school and you couldn’t teach until you upgraded from MPhil to PhD, but I previously taught English in Japan and then accumulated quite a few bits of bobs after my upgrade, too. So far, so good!

Most people do conference presentations as they go along. They’re nerve-wracking, but you get to share your research, pick up new ideas, and often meet some interesting (and perhaps useful) people. You can start off small, presenting at student conferences or at the ‘early career’ section of a major one, and then at some stage move into the bear pit with the grown-ups. It’s all a practice thing and I did a few of these every year, some of which went well, some of which didn’t. Still, I learnt from it, quite enjoy it really, and that’s another box ticked.

Publishing is tricky, particularly during your PhD, unless you’re involved with someone else’s research project. Like me, you may not have anything new to say from your doctorate until you’re near the end of it. You can do book reviews, though, but I’m personally not sure how much this counts. There can be quite a lead time on journal publications: a few months to write, share, revise and then submit them, then a few more until they’re reviewed and sent back. Then you have to address their suggestions and resubmit it, provided they didn’t reject it outright in the first place. Only after all of that – once it’s all been approved, of course – can you put that precious ‘Budd (forthcoming) Catchy But Serious Title, Prestigious Journal, 3 (1), pp.34-52’ on your CV. Books are another option, at least in the social sciences. Unfortunately, you can’t just send the editor your final thesis copy, it’ll need months of rejigging and then more editing. Publications are where I fall flat at the moment. I have one that I’m working on by myself, two collaborative ones from other work I’ve done or am currently doing, and then at least three more from my PhD. In a year from now, it’ll all look rosier, and in two years, peachy!

Research funding is a bit of a Catch-22 in that you can’t get funding without a permanent job or a permanent job without funding! The ideal route is that you get a two to three-year ‘post-doc’ soon after your viva that brings everything on the list with it – research, teaching, presentations, publications, and research funding. People in the sciences tend to do a few of these before getting a permanent job, but in the social sciences it’s usually one, and there are far less of them around. They’re often not that well paid and/or quite short term, which is completely unhelpful if you’ve got a family and can’t move around every six to 12 months.

I hope most people are more informed about what happens after the doctorate than I was four years ago. I did manage to work most of this out as I went along, though, and am now only a few publications short of the next stop on the ladder. Some people I know have moved from their doctorate to a lectureship almost seamlessly, but this is pretty unusual. It’s probably good to be aware that there is a bit of a chasm between completing your thesis and The Job. You may have to fill the gap with part-time and/or short-term contracts, and you’ll need to collect certain building blocks to construct your bridge to the other side. Good luck…

New Year’s revelations

Posted on 14 January 201514 January 2015 by Doctoral College

Louise Wingrove is a third-year postgraduate researcher in the department of Drama: Theatre, Film and Television. Her research is focused on how the lives of working women were represented by serio-comediennes on the Victorian music-hall stage, using the characters and careers of Jenny Hill (1848-1896) and Bessie Bellwood (1856-1896) as case studies. Most of her research is archive based, piecing together long lost careers, songs and venues through files of reviews, photographs and sheet music.

This is Louise’s second entry for the ‘Year in the Life of a PhD’ blog. Her first entry, entitled ‘Belonging in archives’, discussed the challenges of finding your niche as a researcher and the joy of learning new skills.

Having taken time off to welcome in the new year (I know – a PhD student taking time off –a reckless and laughable idea!) I awoke on January 1st 2015 with a realisation that made my brain freeze: I am due to submit this year! Not the end of next year, but this year! Having read all of the other fantastic blogs in this project, I have noticed a popular theme regarding the PhD panic that can set in. That moment when imposter syndrome strikes and one becomes convinced they have somehow slipped under the radar and security is sure to storm the building soon and wrestle you back to reality. Yet, mid panic attack, paper bag in hand, I thought about this exact time the previous two years.

January 2013 – I had just been offered the chance to write two short pieces about the careers of Marie Lloyd and Sarah Millican for a fantastic book celebrating the great successes of female stand-up comics over the years. Written and edited by Jane Duffus of Bristol’s highly successful “What the Frock” comedy club the book was sure to be excellent and there was the added bonus of making great contacts. I was one term into my PhD and, though I later jumped at the chance to be a part of such a brilliant project – I suddenly lost every bit of confidence I had ever had and nearly turned it down for the reason that “someone like me couldn’t do something like that.” Two years later and I can’t believe how worried I was and I am incredibly excited to see it be released later this year.

January 2014 – The new year nineteenth century panic! I had decided (through my love of music hall and obvious fixation on the archives) that I would now just be looking at women from the Victorian Music Hall. The snag – I knew nothing about the Victorian Era! I’d never even read a Charles Dickens novel – The Muppets Christmas Carol being my closest link. And, on top of that, the suggestion had been made that I should speak at conferences this year. Now, I actually love public speaking and had also just happily given a paper at a symposium within the department BUT – why on Earth would anybody want to listen to me when they could listen to real academics? Suddenly the curse of the January brain freeze hit again and the thought of learning all about Victorian history and giving papers at conferences by the end of the year seemed mightily implausible and headache inducing. After a bit of a sulk and internal tantrum, I got several history books on the nineteenth century in general and locked myself away to read…and read…and read. The more I read, the clearer my research path became and the less out of my depth I felt. And after establishing that I was not alone in this feeling of irrational inadequacy, I felt confident enough to attend conferences – making contacts and starting to use the new information I was immersing myself in. I had a sudden set back – health problems arose that threatened to put me right back again. However this seemed to actually give me the focus I needed and, before I knew it I was preparing to talk at a conference at a university in Lisbon as well as ones at Glasgow university and Oxford University – putting my research out there to ‘real’ nineteenth century scholars. Glasgow, the first I attended, was the hardest – my confidence in my new found expertise was not quite cemented yet, but all went extremely well and helped to build my confidence increasingly. The excellent GW4 communications conference held at Bristol and bringing together researchers from Cardiff, Exeter and Bath, as well as those here in Bristol, also helped me to develop my networking skills. The contacts these conferences have subsequently given me has boosted my confidence in my abilities as well as helping me select what information to develop and put into my final thesis. In preparation for the Lisbon conference I even recorded myself singing the music hall song I was discussing in my paper – something I have never done before and which therefore both terrified me and gave me an extra thrill as people responded so well to hearing the music for themselves for the first time.

At the end of 2014 I remained on track with my studies – developed my historical and social understanding more than I ever expected and have travelled, giving well-received papers at conferences, despite my initial reaction to sit under a duvet and cry!

So, as I sit with said duvet applied to my head in the January of 2015 fearing my thesis write up, new teaching opportunities and the multiple plans of what to do after my PhD – I know in January 2016 I will be sat in exactly the same position, laughing at this year’s ‘trivial’ worries, and devising ways to try and release me from all the scary new things 2016 hold.