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This paper aims to outline a participative approach to researching education doctoral students' trajectories that functions both as a form of training in research methodology and as a means of reflection on the doctoral trajectory and what doctoral students have brought to the doctoral process through their experience.

Ten participants formed dyads and acted as both researchers and subjects of research, using narrative accounts and interviews. The collaborative approach aimed to allow “hands‐on” experience of the selected methods, as well as full engagement in negotiating each stage of the project.

Project group meetings and the data generated by participants provided a rich source of learning about methodological issues in education research, in addition to the personal understandings emerging from such a project.

This project reports an approach to “hands‐on” learning of methodological and ethical issues within doctoral development programmes that could be adapted for use on similar programmes. It suggests an alternative to the more common forms of doctoral training (such as exposition, discussion, reading, or simulation) that is of real value to doctoral students in that it enables deep reflection on the journeys that have brought students to doctoral study, whilst at the same time providing a rich resource for methodological learning.

The purpose of this study is to examine doctoral students’ developmental trajectories in well-being and disciplinary identity during the first three years of doctoral study.

This study relies on data from a longitudinal study of PhD students enrolled at a large, research-intensive university in the USA. A group-based trajectory modeling approach is used to examine varying trajectories of well-being and disciplinary identity.

The authors find that students’ physical health, mental health and disciplinary identity generally decline during the first few years of doctoral study. Despite this common downward trend, the results suggest that six different developmental trajectories exist. Students’ backgrounds and levels of stress, psychological needs satisfaction, anticipatory socialization experiences and prior academic success predict group membership.

Although there is emergent evidence of a mental health crisis in graduate education scant evidence exists about the way in which well-being changes over time as students progress through their doctoral studies. There is also little evidence of how these changes might be related to academic processes such as the development of disciplinary identity. This study reported varying baseline degrees of well-being and disciplinary identity and offers that stress and unmet psychological needs might be partially responsible for varying trajectories.

The purpose of this paper is to present a theoretically-informed analysis of an exploratory study which included a focus on postdoctoral researchers' views of their training needs.

The wider mixed-methods study was focused on post-doctoral career trajectories at a time of ongoing policy interest in doctoral education. Bernstein's theoretical perspectives are used to illuminate the data, particularly his concepts of classification and regionalisation.

Respondents' reflections on their doctoral training showed a much stronger appreciation of training which was based in disciplinary practices, even if these were subject to regionalisation, as opposed to more generic professional skills training.

The small scale and exploratory nature of the study is recognised, as well as the need for more independent research in this area.

The study has implications for the nature of the training provided as part of doctoral education. First, it is argued that this should include more explicit discussion of policy shifts relating to doctoral education. Second, rather than being glossed over in the imposition of generic competency frameworks (conceptualised through Bernstein as a generic performance mode), researcher training should attend closely to the social and cultural base of the skills and practices of different regions of knowledge production, at the same time as recognising these to be fluid and dynamic.

Overall, while recognised as exploratory, the study aims to contribute insights on doctoral graduates' perspectives on researcher training as well as suggesting the usefulness of Bernstein's theoretical framework for understanding the reconstruction of doctoral education in the UK.

The underrepresentation of women in engineering has important consequences for meeting the need for a larger, talented scientific and technological labor force. Increasing the proportion of women faculty in engineering will help increase the persistence probabilities of women undergraduate and graduate students in engineering, as well as contribute to the range and diversity of ideas toward innovations and solutions to the greatest engineering challenges. This study aims to examine the association among gender, family formation and post-PhD employment patterns of a cohort of engineering doctorates.

Using the National Science Foundation’s Survey of Doctorate Recipients data, 2001–2010, descriptive and multinomial logit regression analyses are conducted to illustrate the career trajectories of engineering PhDs over a ten-year period.

The career trajectories of engineering PhDs are nonlinear, and transitions between employment sectors commonly occur over the ten-year time period studied. Although women engineering PhDs with young dependents are less likely to be employed initially after PhD completion, they tend to enter the workforce in the academic sector as time progresses. Early post-PhD employment as a postdoctoral researcher or in the academic sector contributes to the pursuit of the professoriate downstream.

While previous studies tend to focus on the early career outcomes of science and engineering students, this study contributes to the literature by focusing on the long-term career outcomes of engineering doctorates. Research findings provide engineering PhD students and PhDs with more information regarding potential post-PhD career trajectories, highlighting the multitude of career options and transitions that occur over time. Research findings also provide higher education administrators and doctoral program stakeholders with foundational information toward designing and revitalizing professional development programs to help PhD students prepare for the workforce. The findings have the potential to be applied toward helping increase diversity by shaping policies and programs to encourage multiple alternative career pathways to the professoriate.

This study aims to examine how PhD students with diverse profiles, intentions and expectations manage to navigate their doctoral paths within the same academic context under similar institutional conditions. Drawing on Giddens’ theory of structuration, this study explores how their primary reasons, motives and motivations for engaging in doctoral studies influence what they perceive as facilitating or constraining to progress, their strategies to face the challenges they encounter and their expectations regarding supervision.

Using a qualitative design, the analysis was conducted on a data subset from an instrumental case study (Stake, 2013) about PhD students’ persistence and progression. The focus is placed on semi-structured interviews carried out with 36 PhD students from six faculties in humanities and social sciences fields at a large Canadian university.

The analysis reveals three distinct scenarios regarding how these PhD students navigate their doctoral paths: the quest for the self; the intellectual quest; and the professional quest. Depending on their quest type, the nature and intensity of PhD students’ concerns and challenges, as well as their strategies and the support they expected, differed.

This study contributes to the discussion about PhD students’ challenges and persistence by offering a unique portrait of how diverse students’ profiles, intentions and expectations can concretely shape a doctoral experience.

The purpose of this article is to present findings from the authors' research into how supervisors of doctoral students cope with change in supervisory relationships where a supervisor takes on a student previously supervised by another, or has to hand over a student to another supervisor's care, and to identify recommendations for applying these findings to supervisory practice.

The research used interviews to gather and analyse perceptions and practices from experienced supervisors, and aimed to identify good practice to support supervisors in enabling transitions to enhance student success. This work is underpinned by work on conceptual threshold‐crossing, students working at sufficiently critical, creative and conceptual levels to achieve doctorates; well‐being and emotional resilience, particularly in doctoral studies. It makes links between knowledge construction, resilience and well‐being, from the perspective of the supervisors, since it focuses on the experience of supervisors engaging with and supporting students.

The research identifies supervisors' anxiety at, and ways of managing the difficulties of, either losing or acquiring students. It highlights effective strategies for taking on students midway into their research to enable successful supervision.

This research offers new knowledge about supervisor perceptions of, experiences with and good practice suggestions for, supporting transitions for doctoral students who change supervisor.

The purpose of this study is to better understand the declines in doctoral students’ mental and physical health while pursuing their doctoral degrees, by revealing the major themes of students’ voluntary comments following a survey that primed students to reflect on these topics.

The present study used qualitative thematic analysis to uncover themes in doctoral students’ voluntary comments on a large-scale, web-based survey of graduate students’ motivation and well-being.

A thematic analysis revealed six major emerging themes: timing in the degree process, work-life balance, health/well-being changes, impostor syndrome, the supervisor and hopelessness.

The themes uncovered in the present study contribute to the literature by highlighting important underexplored topics (e.g. timing in the degree process, hopelessness) in doctoral education research and they are discussed and situated in the context of existing literature.

Implications for doctoral supervisors and departments are discussed.

The present study highlights some pressing concerns among doctoral students, as articulated by the students themselves and can contribute to the betterment of doctoral education, thereby reducing attrition, improving the experiences of doctoral students and possibly affording more candidates to achieve a doctoral degree.

The present study makes the above-mentioned contributions by taking a novel approach and analyzing doctoral students’ voluntary comments (n = 607) on a large-scale, web-based survey. Thus, while some of the themes were primed by the survey itself, the data represent issues/concerns that students perceived as important enough to comment about after already having completed a lengthy questionnaire.

The paper investigates the pivotal role of storytelling as a pedagogical tool in tertiary education, specifically in the context of the practice-based doctoral framework in design disciplines. In such a doctoral model, storytelling assumes different meanings and nuances that open to a study in relation to the self-reflective process at the core of the learning paradigm.

The research methodology integrates a qualitative and participatory approach with visual and design-based methods through which the authors interact with primary sources (the body of work of PhD candidates) and relevant research literature.

Drawing on the expanding field of creative practice research, the research work evidences the emergence of storytelling as a research method and learning tool applied at different levels of the candidates' Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) journey and provides methodological insights into the practice-based doctoral training paradigm.

The paper demonstrates the role of storytelling as a learning tool and evidences the multiple levels that storytelling assumes over the course of a practice-based doctoral journey, integrating processual, operational and contextual dimensions.

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.

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.