Bill Buchanan - Top 101 Tips for a PhD student and ECR

Well, here are a few tips for PhD students and ECR (Early Career Researchers): Enjoy doing research. It is fun and one of the few times in your career when it is solely your work. To do a PhD is a privilege and not a chore. You will likely look back on it as one of the most useful things you did in your whole career. You will always hit a dip in your research. Know when that is happening, and find ways out of it. Change something in your approach. Re-ignite yourself with new topics or methods. Find a great new paper that has just been published. Fight the dip! Two years of a PhD pass by fast. Be ready for the “last year of research” spike. We often do research to repeat what others have done and add our little bit. You can’t add your little bit unless you have repeated the work of others. Validate and verify your work before you evaluate it. One slip, and everything can fall apart. Most people have flaws in initial version of their work, so don’t worry if you find flaws, it’s all part of refinement of your work. We are human, by the way! Be able to show an external person the work you have done in validating that what you have is correct. Always be ready to point to peer review work to show that something is correctly defined. Doodles with pen and paper are great for getting your mind in gear. Have a thick skin — both from your supervisors, others around you, and, most of all, peer reviewers and your external examiner. Most peer reviewers are trying to help you, while others are just nasty for the sake of it or have not created the paper that they wanted. Try to spot the bad/nasty reviewer and focus on the helpful reviewers. Few people see your failures, but most will see your successes. Know your successes when they arrive, and write them down as your progress. At the end of your work, you should be able to show the successes you had along the way. Have a vision for your work, and continually refine it. Define your own beliefs, ethics and standards for your work and stick to these, such as “I will not release drafts to review, until I have fully read them”, “I will return updates to drafts of comments from my supervisors within one week”, and “I will not publish in poor quality outlets”. Agree these with your supervisory team, and get them to commit to things from their side. Define missions within your work and strive for these, and when that mission is achieved, go on to the next one (unless your get to the end, of course). Don’t end up just being theoretical. A core part of a PhD is doing practical work, too. Make sure you code and experiment. Don’t spend one year doing a literature review. Get coding and run experiments. A thesis is not a chronological diary. It should be written with an aim to show some new novely or knowledge, and not the sequence of things you did in your research. Throughout your work, especially in the 2nd and 3rd year of a PhD, continually run small experiments and get some results. Have a hypothesis about experiments, and prove or disprove this. Know the top people in your field, and be able to quote their work. Be inspired by other researchers. Be humble about your own work, and help others. Ask for advice from others where your supervision team lack skills, such as contacting pure mathematicians or physicists. Don’t be shy in saying that you don’t understand something. Don’t ever copy and paste work from others into your own work. Rephrase in your own words. Don’t use AI tools for descriptions. The reader will typically spot these — as the writing style often changes. Be consistent in your writing style. Read the work of others — especially great science/technical writers — and understand the methods they use to engage readers. Define simple, practical and useful abstractions of the techniques you are defining. Abstract your work into other areas and get them to think in other ways around the methods you are defining … “let’s think about the little boy who put his finger in the dam; if we had a mathematical equation for this, we would …” Many would define this as, “Explain it to a smart 12-year-old child”. Explain your work to your family and friends. If they can’t understand the problem and your solution, refine it until they can. Always be ready to give an elevator pitch … you have two minutes in a lift with Bill Gates and need to define the problem, your solution, and the potential. Know the potential impact of your work. Is it technical advancement? Is it social change? If everything worked well, and you did invent an amazing new widget, what you be the best outcome? A tech unicorn? Saving 1,000s of lives? Reducing carbon emissions? Improving people’s lives? Protect your IP when you need to. Patents are one way to do this, so just don’t blindly publish every you have. If you read papers and do not quite understand how the method works, reach out to the writers of the paper, and ask questions or pose ideas. They might not reply, but if they do, they may help you with your thoughts. Build a network of contacts outside your university, and be part of a community that shares knowledge. Supervise undergraduate students for their dissertations — but be considerate, and don’t expect them to be working at a PhD level. Know why you are doing research and your end objective. Define whether the PhD is an end goal or that it is defining the start of a research career. Plan your research career and aim for the job you hope to get in the future. Don’t add your name to poor-quality work … you will get a bad reputation. Know what esteem looks like in your area, and try and build it. Avoid publishing work which you are not proud of. If it is mainly your work, you must be the first author on the paper. Don’t use the first person of “I” or “me” in any publication or thesis, unless you are giving a personal statement of something. In reporting on your research progress, showcase that you can summarise well, and show examples of your research writing without over doing it. Learn a new method every day/week. Don’t just read about a method; try and implement it in code, and see if it works. An abstract is not an introduction! The creation of an abstract is an art and is a distilled version of the thesis/paper. The title is the first thing that someone sees, so get it right! The abstract is the second thing that someone sees, so make sure that it is beautifully crafted and that the reader can finish there and know all about your work. Review, rewrite, review, rewrite, review, rewrite your abstract, and fit it into one page. The introduction and conclusions of each chapter are like bread in a sandwich. Make sure they hold the sandwich together. Review your introductions to chapters, and bring your reader back to the focus of the thesis and what you are going to show them. An introduction to a chapter should be less than one page, otherwise, it is too rambling. Get on point as to what a chapter intends to do, and get rid of anything that deviates away from that. Use appendices to park material that just does fit in a chapter, but the remainder to reference them. Few people ever read an appendix, so they possibly need less rigour in their structure and presentation. In a thesis, every word matters. Get rid of words that are not required. Enjoy some downtime, find a nice space, and properly read a paper. If possible, spend 2–4 hours just reading a paper without distractions. Find a buddy, read a paper together, and discuss it. This could be your supervisor, but you may find that they do not read the paper. Make sure that your supervisor checks your work for accuracy. If they do not, get someone else you trust to check the work. Do not submit papers without knowing that you have checked fully for typos and bad grammar. It is a sign of a weak research team that a paper is full of annoying typos and an easy rejection. Make sure your papers have all the right features so that you will not get a rejection on the layout of a paper. Enough references? No typos? Aim and contribution defined? The literature review covered? The method defined clearly? Results will present? Conclusions bring back the main contrition and significant result? Read your work aloud, and if you stumble on the words … rewrite it. Be kind to your read, and break up long runs of text with diagrams. Know your target reader(s) and their knowledge. Consider adding a theory/background chapter if you feel they need it, but also allow them to skip it if they know the area. A literature review is full of references. Virtually every paragraph should have at last one reference — otherwise, it is not a literature review. If you can, avoid the same reference being used continually for your literature … otherwise you are outlining someone else's work and not yours. Don’t add your own analysis of methods in the literature review; leave that for later, such as in the conclusions. Everything in the literature review is the basis of published work. Avoid poor quality sources … paper mills, blog posts, and social media quotes (unless your whole thesis is focused on this). Papers published in paper mills with poor standards should never be used as they have not been rigorously reviewed. A picture is worth many words. Be kind to your reader, and abstract your thoughts with nice (and simple) diagrams that are not copied from others but your own thoughts on the topic, and which link to the narrative. In fact, draw your chapter with pictures, first, and then write around these pictures. In your diagrams, avoid small text, poor contrast, and too much complexity. Remember to add a reference in the text to every figure and every table. These references should appear before the figure or table. Don’t break your text with a figure. Make sure it floats to the bottom or the top of the next page. A chapter should be between 15 and 25 pages. If it is longer, split the chapter. If it is shorter, consider merging with another chapter. The best PhD thesis’ has a core around five themes: Introduction; Literature Review; Method; Evaluation; and Conclusions. Be up-front about your contribution, and don’t overclaim that you have solved every problem in the area. Be humble, and be open about whose work you build on. Don’t have long paragraphs of text … give your reader a break, and them up with paragraphs (but don’t make them too short, too). A rule of thumb — a paragraph should be at least 2–3 sentences and probably less than half a page of text. Read, revise, read, revise, read, revise … get into a spirit of continually reading your work. Trace relevant recent publications back to the classic paper, which started a whole field of enquiry, and read that. Your writing skills will improve over time. Go back over things you have written in the past, and rewrite them. Speak to the reader as if they were in the same room as you. The first paper of a paper or thesis is the most important part. Tell the reader the significance of the problem and why they should be interested. Hit them with facts and figures that are significant. Up-front, tell them what you are going to show them … it’s not a secret, and it is too late — at the end — to show them. Avoid Microsoft Word wherever possible, and use LaTeX (such as with Overleaf). Once you get over the barrier of learning to create a mark-up document, your production will be so much higher, and you will produce nicely defined papers in an instant. Use GitHub to store your code and documents. But, remember to keep it private and only share it with trusted people. Link your LaTeX document to GitHub, and regularly back up. If you can, enable version control on your document, and keep a trace of editing updates. Rather than sharing a draft paper in a PDF with your supervisors, send them a share of the Overleaf document. Initially, in the first stages of your research, ask supervisors to clearly mark up typos, bad grammar and mistakes. At later stages, it is probably acceptable to allow them to update without highlighting. When you read a great paper, mark it up with a highlighter (either paper-based on highly on PDF) … show your supervisor how detailed you read a paper, and discuss these points with them. Keep a paper log book of your work, and write down your thoughts and ideas as you go along. Remember to put the date on it and get it signed by your supervisor on a regular basis — especially when you have a breakthrough. Think about the best way to present results and try to aggregate them together rather than having long sequences of diagrams and tables. A single table is often the best way to bring all your results together. A graph has an x-axis and a y-axis — make sure you label these correctly. Microsoft Excel is often poor at drawing graphs. Try to properly present at a quality which could be publishable. Figure labels go below the diagram, and table labels go above the table. Avoid summaries at any point in a thesis. This can just annoy the reader, as they have just read all the work. Leave your summary to the end of a chapter. Be focused on your conclusions, and recap the main things you are taking forward and what you are rejecting. A good conclusion can be fitted into less than one page. The tail-end of the thesis is the conclusion and the future work. Bring back the problem statement and your objectives, and tell the reader how the thesis addresses these, and the main significance of your work. Remember to conclude all parts of your thesis, too. And, be humble, and show that you have not solved everything in the area and where your work can be improved. The future work is your chance to shine, and where others can follow your work. Get it right, and help others. Get enterprise training early on, and understand how your work could be used by who and why? If you can, do some maths. Layout your maths properly, and, for example, don’t use “*” for multiplication. Use a proper LaTeX equation layout for these. Remember to also use in-text equation markup too, and name and describe every variable used. Store the data from all your experiments, as it may be asked for in the future. Write blogs and do some public engagement, and modify your writing and presentation style to suit. If you are an ECR, don’t lose the skills you picked up on your PhD … still read papers and have your own vision and mission statements. Go deep in your research rather than surface learning. Get some textbooks, and read about the background theory.