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The purpose of this paper is to focus on doctoral students in Germany and the drivers behind their intention to enter an academic career. The aspirations of young researchers after graduating from doctoral training have become an important issue to policymakers in light of the changing nature of doctoral training.

Borrowing from Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behavior, we investigate how attitudes towards a career in academia, subjective norms and perceived behavioral control determine graduates’ intentions to pursue an academic career. We extend the model of Ajzen by measurements of research and training conditions in order to estimate the impact of organizational settings. We analyze a sample of 5,770 doctoral candidates from eight universities and three funding organizations.

We find that apart from attitudes towards careers, academic career intentions are related to research and training conditions at the organizational level. Further, we find that large differences within the field of study and affiliation to a university or funding organization provide substantial explanations.

This paper explores doctoral candidates’ academic career intentions which are an important precondition for the propagation of academic staff. For developers and practitioners in the field of doctoral training, our results yield a good understanding of the relationship between organizational settings at the level of doctoral training and career intentions.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the reliability and validity of doctoral candidates’ innovative personality model.

Based on doctoral candidates’ innovative personality model, this study took the best correlation and the worst correlation into account to predict and demonstrate their innovative ability tendencies. Matlab R2016a, a program of software programming, was used to calculate the contribution degree of each personality factor of doctoral candidates to their innovative ability tendencies.

The reliability and validity of doctoral candidates’ innovative personality model based on grey target theory have been verified, and the prediction for doctoral candidates’ innovative ability tendencies can be realized on the basis of this model.

Scientific and reasonable doctoral candidates’ innovative personality model can play a good guiding role, and its research results have certain practical significance for selecting innovative doctoral candidates, ensuring the training quality of doctoral candidates and cultivating the innovative ability of doctoral candidates. It can be promoted and applied on the basis of its trial operation in Jiangsu.

With regard to the relative degree of the influence of doctoral candidates’ individual personality factors, previous researchers seldom carried out the quantitative research. In this paper, the author sought a quantitative method to describe the degree of such influence and constructed the doctoral candidates’ innovative personality model based on grey target decision making. This study took the positive and negative off-target distance into account and demonstrated the rationality and validity of doctoral candidates’ innovative personality model.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had its impact on research and researchers, potentially influencing the future of academia. Yet, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, there are no empirical studies on the alignment between supervisors’ and supervisees’ estimates of the impact of COVID-19. This study aims to contribute to bridging this gap by exploring PhD candidates’ and supervisors’ perceptions of the impact of COVID-19 on candidates’ study progress and study well-being, and whether the estimates were related to supervisors’ and supervisees’ well-being.

A total of 768 PhD candidates and 561 doctoral supervisors from a large multifield research-intensive university in Finland participated in this quantitative study. Data were collected with the doctoral experience survey and the supervisory experience survey.

In general, the results show that both supervisors and supervisees recognised the negative impact of the pandemic on candidates’ well-being and progress, and their perceptions were quite well aligned. However, supervisors estimated that the impact had been more detrimental than the supervisees did. The results also show that the supervisors’ perceptions of the negative impact of COVID-19 on candidates’ progress and well-being were related to reduced levels of their own well-being.

Results can be used in developing effective support means for both the supervisors and supervisees to overcome the hardships caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and to avoid long-term negative consequences for the candidates in degree completion, career trajectories and the future of the academy.

This study aims to advance the understanding on individual variations in PhD candidates’ personal interest in their doctorate and supervisory and research community support, and several individual and structural attributes potentially having an impact on the profiles.

The authors explored the interrelationship between personal interest – social support profiles, and nationality, gender, research group and study status and the risk of dropping out. A total of 768 PhD candidates from a research-intensive university in Finland responded to a modified version of the cross-cultural doctoral experience survey. Latent profile analysis was used to explore the individual variations in PhD candidates’ interest and support from the supervisor and research community.

Three distinctive PhD interest-social support profiles were detected; the high interest–high support profile (74.4%, n = 570), the high interest–moderate support profile (18.2%, n = 140) and the moderate interest–moderate support profile (7.4%, n = 56). The profiles exhibited high to moderate levels of research, development and instrumental interest. Individuals in the high interest–moderate support and in the moderate interest–moderate support profiles were more prone to consider dropping out from their PhD than in the high interest–high support profile.

The results indicate that by cultivating PhD candidates’ interest and providing sufficient supervisory and the research community offers a means for preventing candidates from discontinuing their doctorate. Hence, building a supportive learning environment that cultivates a PhD candidate’s personal interest is likely to reduce high dropout rates among the candidates.

This paper aims to explore doctoral candidates’ ethical work in writing the acknowledgements section of their theses. With interest in the formation of academic identities/subjectivities, the authors explore acknowledgements writing as always potentially a form of parrhesia or risky truth-telling, through which the candidate places themselves in their relations to others rather than in their claims to knowledge (Luxon, 2008).

Doctoral candidates from all faculties in one Japanese and one Aotearoa New Zealand university participated in focus groups where they discussed the genre of thesis acknowledgements, drafted their own version and wrote a reflective commentary/backstory.

Viewing the backstories through the lens of parrhesia (with its entangled matters of frankness, truth, risk, criticism and duty) showed candidates engaged in complex ethical decision-making processes with, at best, “ambiguous ethical resources” (Luxon, 2008, p. 381) arising from their academic and personal lives. Candidates used these resources to try and position themselves as both properly academic and more than academic – as knowing selves and relational selves.

This study bares the ethical riskiness of writing doctoral acknowledgements, as doctoral candidates navigate the tensions between situating themselves “truthfully” in their relations with others while striking the necessary pose of intellectual independence (originality). In a context where there is evidence that examiners not only read acknowledgements to ascertain independence, student and/or supervisor quality and the “human being behind the thesis” (Kumar and Sanderson, 2020, p. 285) but also show bias in those readings, this study advises reader caution about drawing inferences from acknowledgements texts. They are not simply transparent. As examiners and other readers make sense, judgments even, of these tiny, often fascinating, glimpses into a candidate’s doctoral experience, they need to understand that a host of unpredictable tensions with myriad ambiguous effects are present on the page.

This paper aims to investigate doctoral examiners' narratives on their expectations of the candidate's oral performance in the PhD viva. Both the PhD examiners and handbooks that offer advice on the PhD viva preparation appear to share the same expectation of the candidate's oral performance in the viva. That is, candidates must answer questions to the satisfaction of examiners to warrant a pass in the oral examination. However, what constitutes a satisfactory viva performance – let alone an excellent one – is often undefined.

Using narrative inquiry as the guiding research approach to investigate this issue, 12 experienced doctoral examiners from across the disciplines at a Malaysian research university were interviewed. Their narratives were analysed inductively.

The findings show that examiners expect candidates to speak the language of defence by manifesting confident, interactional behaviour, providing credible and convincing responses and displaying doctoralness. The aspects of candidate's oral performance undesired by the examiners, as well as the reasons for having such expectations, are also discussed. The paper argues that the expectations of examiners in the PhD viva should be made explicit and communicated to the candidates and examiners to ensure a positive doctoral assessment process and outcome.

This paper contributes to the literature on doctoral assessment, particularly on the PhD viva, through the voices of examiners in the Global South. It also offers an examiner expectancy model of the PhD viva.

The purpose of this paper is to present a case for appraisal of the current curriculum provisions for international students. In this paper, the authors summarise the key challenges of Asian international research graduate students pursuing doctorate studies in Australian universities to become researchers for the global communities. The intention is to advocate further research on current higher degree research curriculum with a view to enriching the developmental experiences of international research graduate students in preparation for global practice.

This is an analytical paper that adopts a conceptual and rhetorical approach.

The authors review a growing body of research on higher degree research studies and establish a need for appraisal of current curriculum provisions.

This is the first paper to concentrate on an emerging need to appraise current higher degree research curriculum provisions to enhance the development international research graduate students for global practices.

Knowing what occurs at doctoral vivas is restricted to those who attend. Since 1998 the author has observed the transactions of doctoral vivas in the disciplines of applied sciences, education, environmental sciences and social science as either Chair, examiner or supervisor. With the agreement of participants the author’s participation in, and observation of, viva processes enabled him to collect data. Records were made of examiners’ questions, and the discussions that were held with participants. The evidence shows that patterns of generic questions transcend disciplines, and their respective types of questions reflect relationships between examiners. The evidence portrays how examiners approach, and explore, the nature of doctorateness. Questions asked in doctoral vivas follow discernible patterns, and specific clusters of questions are critical as examiners determine the outcome of doctoral viva examinations. Questioning by examiners follows different patterns in the natural and social sciences.

Social marketing and government policy are intertwined. Despite this, policy analysis by social marketers is rare. This paper aims to address the dearth of policy analysis in social marketing and introduce and model a methodology grounded in Indigenous knowledge and from an Indigenous standpoint. In Australia, a minuscule number of First Nations people complete doctoral degrees. The most recent, major policy review, the Australian Council of Learned Academies (ACOLA) Report, made a series of recommendations, with some drawn from countries that have successfully uplifted Indigenous doctoral candidates’ success. This paper “speaks back” to the ACOLA Report.

This paper subjects the ACOLA Report, implementation plans and evaluations to a detailed Indigenous Critical Discourse Analysis using Nakata’s Indigenous standpoint theory and Bacchi’s Foucauldian discourse analysis to trace why policy borrowing from other countries is challenging if other elements of the political, social and cultural landscape are fundamentally unsupportive of reforms.

This paper makes arguments about the effects produced by the way the “problem” of First Nations doctoral education has been represented in this suite of Australian policy documents and the ways in which changes could be made that would actually address the pressing need for First Nations doctoral success in Australia.

Conducting policy analysis benefits social marketers in many ways, helping to navigate policy complexities and advocate for meaningful policy reforms for a social cause. This paper aims to spark more social marketing policy analysis and introduces a methodology uncommon to social marketing.

This paper aims to present a summary of findings of a doctoral thesis on the impacts of contingent employment on IT project management (PM) practices in three large representative Hong Kong organisations. It also presents the candidate's experience of the doctoral process in successfully completing the thesis as a mature and experience PM practitioner.

This is a thesis research note reporting on the thesis that was undertaken as a series of case studies and includes reflections on the doctoral experience by the candidate and one of the two supervisors.

The doctoral research findings are summarised and the URL link to the thesis is provided http://researchbank.rmit.edu.au/view/rmit:160254. Important findings about the way that the case study organisations managed the attraction, retention and career development of contingent workers are summarised. The nature of the doctoral journey is presented as findings through reflection.

The thesis addresses a poorly researched area, contingent employment and the relationship between project managers and the organisations that hire them. The way that contingent workers develop their skills and how they may effectively engage in knowledge transfer is vital to organisational learning.

The paper places its discussion in a Hong Kong context. There are few if any such studies in the PM literature in this region and consideration of HR issues for project managers are also an emerging area of research. The doctoral thesis reported upon and the link to it as provided allows readers access to a highly current source of literature and empirical work.