PhD by Publication Explained: A Faster Doctoral Route (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: you've been thinking about doing a PhD faster, but maybe have been struggling or ruled it out because maybe going a full-time path in university just doesn't feel right. Well, I wanna talk to you today because there is another path and a lot of the people who qualify for it never even heard it, don't even know it exists. And it's called a PhD by publication. It's a path that I can start over and do it all over again. It's the path that I would have chosen. And today I wanna break down because I get a lot of questions about this. What is it? Who's it for? How does it work? I want to answer all those questions that maybe you've been scared to ask and give you a live example of what that pathway looks like in practice. So no fluff, no theory. We might get to some of that later with your video questions that you've sent in advance and any questions in the chat, we'll cover those too. But today, by the end of this session, you're gonna know whether a PhD by publication makes sense for you and exactly what you need to do in order to be able to pursue it. So as ever, drop your questions in the chat as we go. Let's get into it. We have a lot of new members joining us today. We're truly international. My name's David Stuckler. I've been a professor many years across Harvard, Oxford, and Cambridge. And I built FastTrack to provide the support that I wish I would have had when I was starting out because looking back, hindsight's always 20-20, you can see a lot of things you could have done more efficiently. And so I created this community and all these lives to pass on the knowledge that I got from mentors that helped me save a lot of time. And I wanna make those available to you, 100% valuable, 100% free right here. If you are interested in working in a more intimate way, do check out our mentorship communities and join over 200 international researchers all working hard to do the best research they can possibly do. So let's dive straight in. And I think before getting into the PhD publication, we need to take a breath and remind ourselves, well, what is the PhD actually for? What is it actually about? Because that's gonna help you understand why the PhD by publication can make sense. And I'm not talking about what it involves or what it costs, although that's an important consideration because it costs you in terms of time and sometimes even money if you're paying for tuition, but what it actually recognized, what it actually involves. So PhD is an independent validation certification that you can contribute to your field. And so it's not like other degrees that you've gotten, it's more like a driver's license. And by the end of a PhD, you're not expected to be a Formula One driver and be able to zoom fast and win competitions. You're expected to be able to drive safely on the road, operate competently and ethically as an independent researcher at the frontier of your field. And that's what examiners look for. They look forward to see, can this person contribute original knowledge and be a card carrying member of our field? Are they one of us? So to speak, you see that in the defense, independent examiners come in and certify, yeah, this passes muster, this meets the grade, you're one of us now. You've taken on the identity as a researcher. Now, here's the thing. So the traditional PhD route, which is, it varies, right? In the UK it's about three years, in the US it could be five to six, depends whether, but there's, if you're full-time, that's what you might expect, a lot of coursework, seminars, being engaged in campus life. That is one way through the traditional PhD to get that recognition, to get that driver's license. But it's not the only way. If you've already been producing research, if you've already been publishing, and if you've already been contributing to your field independently, I see this with people from the World Health Organization and the UN who I work with, in many cases, you may not even realize it, you've actually done all the work for a PhD or a good chunk of it. And PhD by publication is the route that recognizes that, hey, hang on, wait a second, you're actually contributing as a card-carrying member of the field in all but name. And you may already, and this was several researchers who come to me, you may already meet the criteria to get the stamp of a PhD by publication. Okay, so, and guys, interrupt me if you have any questions. So here's the mechanics. So, PhD by publication is this pathway where instead of doing the traditional thesis from scratch, you submit a portfolio of published papers, and that forms the basis of your PhD. And typically it's three to five, it can be more, it varies by field. So there's not a hard and fast rule, but typically that's what we've seen works. And these are papers that you have already written, published, or are in the process of having come out. And so what you need to do, if you wanna do a PhD by publication, you need to have a coherent body of work, just like a traditional PhD in a theme or research area. And just like a traditional PhD, it needs to tell a story together. It can't just be, I did some electrical engineering, now I did some biochemistry, and now I did some anthropology. It needs to be a coherent body that makes sense. And once you have that, the publication done first, then you approach a PhD that offers a PhD by publication. We'll take a look at one of those offers later on today, and I'll show you there, we'll walk through their guidance. You approach the university, not all of them do, so that's important. Usually it's not the very top tier universities, it's often the second tier. You submit your portfolio for consideration, and you will have an interview in which the supervisors evaluate whether, yeah, this meets our criteria. No, you need another paper, that's first author. No, these journals are third tier journals, and we want second tier. Look, there's not a hard, fast guide, just like what can meet the criteria for a PhD in one university might not meet the same criteria in another university. It's not a completely black or white. There is judgment, and that judgment happens at that interview. And then a supervisor is assigned, but they're not really a supervisor who's assigned, they're kind of there to guide you through the final stage because you've already completed the research. So typically what you'll do is you'll have this package of publications, and then this third step, if the university accepts you, you will have to write an introduction and a conclusion that kind of stitches together all those papers into a coherent package. So that's that kind of connective tissue of the PhD. And then you go through, just like a traditional PhD viva, an independent defense. So you will get that fun experience being nervous on the day of having some independent examiners come in and see whether you can think and argue at the doctoral level. And if you can, then they will admit you to the guild. They will say, welcome, here's your driver's license. You have earned a PhD. And on the tin, no different. It says PhD. It doesn't say PhD by publication, traditional PhD. It just says PhD interview. That's it. No years of coursework, no campus, no full-time commitment. Just your research, that connective tissue, and a real defense experience. So you can have all the fun and anxiety and nerves and celebration happening. So let me step back for a second and give you my thoughts on who this makes sense for and who it does not. So if you are, this makes sense for you if you are very busy and you don't see yourself taking time out of whatever you're doing to go to a traditional full-time PhD. This is good for you if you want to publish and develop real actionable research skills and cut straight to what matters rather than maybe get a broader, wider set of training. This works, and this is important, if you are self-motivated. You don't need a lot of hand-holding. You can drive yourself forward without someone checking in on you every week. It's especially important to be an action-taker if you want to do a PhD by publication. This is for you if you don't want to spend a lot on tuition fees for a traditional program, or you don't want to get a stipend, you often have to pay for it another way. You have to do teaching or other things. You don't want to make those sacrifices that will happen in a traditional program. And it's especially good if you're a working professional, a clinician, or already an independent researcher in an organization, someone who's already contributing at a high level in your field and you want the potential to certify the contributions that you're already making to your field. Now, who is this not for? It's not for you if you want the traditional student experience, you want to be on campus, you want to have a cohort, you want to have peers around you going through the academic journey together, you want to attend seminars, you want to get that rich, broad education, you want to take the kind of core courseworks to plug gaps in your knowledge and get that rich foundation. Then, yeah, then PhD by publication doesn't make sense for you. If you want to make that deep investment and learn a lot of complex new skills, traditional PhD full-time gives you the time and space to do that. If you do have a lot of time to invest, and you want to develop those skills from scratch, I do recommend a traditional PhD structure. If you're the type of person and you know your style, but you need a lot of structure and guidance to stay on track, then a PhD publication is probably gonna drive you crazy and is not the right path. I already see the split sometimes where in the US, there's more structure built into PhDs, in the UK, structure of PhDs is if you're kind of left on your own a bit. If you're the type of person who prefers a US style, then you're definitely not gonna like PhD by publication. And whichever side of this list for you, not for you, you fall on, I mean, there's no judgment. One's not better than the other. I did a traditional PhD. It was a genuinely valuable experience for me then. I think looking back and the characteristics and kind of how I'm wired, I would have loved the PhD by publication. I just didn't know about it. And so hindsight's 20-20, but I'm really grateful for the experience that I had. If you heard that first list and you thought, you know, that sounds like me, then I think a PhD by publication deserves a serious look. At least keep it in mind. And if you're somebody who's struggling in your PhD and you're actually not enjoying some of what you're doing, you just wanna get straight to the point, just publish papers, move on with your life, then the PhD by publication also might be well worth considering. And the reason it's legitimate, people ask me, well, is this legit? And again, yes, it is. And it's because it maps on to what a PhD actually does. Remember the driver's license. People are asking, can you contribute independently to the field? Well, if you have published in top journals that have gone out to independent reviewers and they said, yeah, this is a contribution, you've actually answered that question for the examiners and other members of the field with direct evidence, right? You haven't just claimed you can do it, you've done it. It's been publicly accepted. It's been peer reviewed. It's been refereed, accepted by journals. So the PhD by publication just recognizes that process where traditional PhD doesn't really demand publication in the same way. It's kind of simulating it through the defense process. That's the way it works. So it's not a shortcut, it's just different. And in some ways, it's a more rigorous way for the same kind of validation. It's just, right, the field has already actually assessed your work at this stage. So let me go through and show you one institution. I mean, there's quite a few who offer this and show you kind of what their guidelines look like. And let me take a quick glance at the chat. I see Blue Tanso saying, definitely what I'm aiming for and 070707 Sam. We got a 0007, looking forward to the session. Got one way to be, thank you for these sessions. This is your time. I do these sessions based on the questions that I got from you every week. And so Jeff says, when I look at PhD by publication at a handful of UK universities, they seem to be restricted to current staff faculty. Guessing a PhD, is this normal in the UK? Where is my anecdotal data unrepresented? Well, we can look at one together here. So some universities will offer that to current staff. You might have a lecturer who maybe had a master's degree and didn't have a PhD and they offer a pathway inside the university for existing staff. But there are definitely ones that are available to those who are not part of the university. So let's take a look at one. And let me share my screen and then we'll go through it. So got a whiteboard up here. Let me flip this around and make it bigger. So I'm gonna look at, for example, University of Portsmouth and PhD by publication is in the UK. I'll zoom in a bit so you guys don't go blind. Hopefully you'll be able to see this. Okay, so cool. It's a postgraduate research degree based on research you've already undertaken before registering. So, and like it says, it's gonna vary based on, based on your subject area. And typically, exactly like I said, you're going to have an introduction, usually an introduction and conclusion, about five, 10,000 words. It's gonna be that connective tissue that stitches it all together. There are some requirements. You can't, you need to have a degree, right? And many will require at least a master's degree already. It varies, but it has to be equivalent to it. So again, you got to check the guidance. It varies by institution. And these are all remote, right? Like I said, if you want the traditional experience, this is not for you. There is a fee. In their case, the fee is 5,000 pounds, but that's it. That's all in. So it's gonna vary. Again, institutions are gonna vary by this, but that is considerably lower if you're fee paying than going for multiple years. And how do you apply? So to be considered, you have to do this. And to apply, it's just kind of a standard application, CV, some referees, title, and all, but here's what's different. You're gonna list the published work it's gonna be based on, and kind of a short statement of why this is significant. And I'll go into their guidance in a little more detail. Again, I picked on them as an example, but there's multiple examples that are out there. And exactly this, right? It's all based on what have you already done and published. And if you have any questions, I've got contacts below. Right, I have no affiliation with this university at all. It's just for the sake of example. PSU by publication guidance, so if you go here, and let me just go to some highlights here. Eligibility, let me zoom in so you guys don't go blind again. Hopefully you can see, you can see this. Can you guys see this? No, we can't see this. All right. So let's look here. Let me adjust this. Try to make this so you can see on the screen. Anyway, it says it's intended to enable people with significant peer-reviewed history of research outputs to achieve their first level eight qualification. Okay, this is a UK phenomenon of what like the PhD is. If you already hold it, so if you already hold a PhD, this is not for you. And then here, a candidate prepares a thesis on the basis of peer-reviewed papers and it makes it into a portfolio. Each output must have been published or accepted or performed prior to the program. So that's what's different, right? You're not going into the program and then doing the research. You're doing the research first and then going into the program. These have to be real research outputs, right? So you just publish something and put it on your website. That obviously doesn't make the grade, right? It has to go through an academic peer review. It's part-time and you're expected to be done between six and 12 months from registration date. And that makes sense. You've already finished the research. You're just getting that rubber stamp on it in a way. And so entry qualifications, they say, or you've got a first degree or a master's degree. So they don't require a master's. You could have a first degree. So an undergrad degree can be enough. There's more details here, but it's, I mean, nothing too fancy here. It's actually not that complicated. It's straightforward because the hard part is getting the original research done. So I won't go through all of this, guys. I'm just scanning through this. If there's anything else I want to highlight here, they're gonna appoint two independent examiners. It's the same process as a normal PhD. Your supervisor, supervisor per se, is going to kind of play more an admin role in setting all this up. And they're not gonna send you forward, or you're not even gonna enter or go down this path if they don't think you've met them before. Let me go down, though. They've got a couple examples. So let's scroll. Okay, here we go. So business and law. And you can see this is the variation. They say that the portfolio publications must, in its entirety, demonstrate evidence that the research is at a standard of academic quality deemed to be appropriate for the award of a doctorate. Well, exactly. But it doesn't give you that clarity. Because they're gonna make a judgment, which is what they often always will do, is they'll make a judgment whether to pass you on to a VIBA. Let's go look at another one. Yeah, oh, this is important here. Joint authorship. Let's see. The applicant should be the main contributing author in a majority of publications. So that will often happen. If you have a whole bunch of co-authored papers, you probably need at least one that you've done yourself. I find it's better if you're the lead author. You might need to get explanations about what your contribution was. You might need to get your co-authors to kind of verify what your role was and what you did. But typically, you want to be the lead author. And so it says that the inclusion of at least one single authored paper is encouraged. I highly recommend building this on the basis of a first authored publication. So they can count them, but exactly here. This is what I'm saying. Okay, they want to see a contribution statement of your contribution. Right, so you can see, this is mimicking what you're supposed to do in a PhD. Now, okay, if you guys want to go through, you can find this on the website. Just Google PhD by publication, and you'll find lots of different ones. I went through quite some of them here. Let me turn and take your questions. What's powerful is this means that you, imagine you were just thinking now about doing a PhD. This innovative pathway means you don't actually have to go through, like I said, a lot of people think they have to go through a traditional university experience to get a PhD. That is no longer the case. And I think that's important because it opens up the possibility of a PhD to a lot of people who deserve it, but just can't imagine three to five years out of their career, whatever they're doing to go down this traditional path. So let me turn to your questions. We've got a whole bunch of questions here. So Ama19128 says, does it mean one needs to have a publication before being considered? Yes, yes. In the humanities, there can be some leeway, but typically even there, you don't want to see a manuscript of a book, for example. So yes, it's PhD by publication. That means the by publication part is you need to have published and met the standard of independent academic review in your field. Chechi2222 says, I'm doing a PhD by publication in the UK in engineering and working in a research institution as well. I need to write 10,000 words, many pieces. So inside some institutions, there's also the style of the PhD that's also like PhD by publication. It's just part of a traditional program. The difference is you're just doing the research in the traditional program. So the styles of PhD, there's two broad styles in the traditional PhD world. There is the style that's more like a book where you might have an introduction, a theory, methods, some results, some conclusions, or you can even have a by publication style where you have introduction and conclusion, just like the PhD by publication and you have paper one, paper two, paper three. That's more common in economics, engineering, harder sciences. So yeah, Chechi, I think you're doing a by publication style but in a traditional program is what it sounds like. Chechi2222 says, I'm confused by the depth of information I should give. Yeah, so again, you've got to talk with your supervisors about what they need for that introduction and conclusion. But typically your introduction is gonna follow the same pattern as most introductions of why is this topic so important? What are the big gaps? What's the edge of the evidence? What's the big gap you're gonna fill? What are the big research questions you're gonna ask and address in the following papers? And in the conclusion, you're gonna step back and synthesize, do more interpretation across these papers, what you did, what you found, what it means for the field, what should be done for future research, what implications does it have for practice or policy? So just like any kind of introduction or conclusion of one paper, same ingredients, but just on a bigger scale, looking across the body of research that you've done. But again, I'd encourage you to consult with whoever your supervisor is. And the other thing that I recommended in dissertation planning 101 is go look at successful theses in your department because it's gonna show you. It will show you what passed the bar already and how they did it. So a lot of people, if you go back and watch my live, it was a few weeks ago, dissertation planning 101, that is one of the two steps that I said 90% of all researchers skip. And not to be mean, it sounds like you might've skipped that step. So I'd really encourage you to do that because it will demystify the process better than I can because it will show you exactly what's worked in your department and sometimes even for your specific supervisor, if you can dig that up. Triple O seven, Sam, funnest YouTube panel to say, does it matter which university you select for a PhD by publication? Does the ranking of the university matter? Well, yes and no. At the end of the day, it's a PhD from a legit ranked university. I wouldn't go to some university that's not ranked. That's right. There's just like there's scam journals or scam universities out there. So you gotta be careful because then your PhD won't even be worth the piece of paper it's printed on. So go find a legit university. Portsmouth is a legit university, right? There are several. So if you're having trouble knowing if it's legit, send a question to us and we can check that out. But often you'll have different lists of universities. You'll have world global rankings and you can see there if they actually show up. But on some level, right? It just depends where you're at in your field. If you wanna go down an academic path, I mean, even applying for jobs as a postdoc, say people are gonna look at your output. Can you actually do the thing? Can you do the research? Are you showing some independence? Will you be a meaningful member of the team? Are you gonna produce and contribute to our department? So having publications answers that question with evidence, not potential, which a lot of PhDs coming out will have potential, but you will be showing proof. And that's quite convincing. So there comes a point, and I was having chat with Jeff about this the other day, where early on your reputation, when people don't know you, they'll look to signals of your reputation. Oh, who are you working with? What institution are you at? Over time, those matter less and less to your reputation. So right early on, when I was a professor at Harvard starting out, Harvard meant something. Nobody knew who I was. Now, institution doesn't really matter. Right? So, but that's a long journey to get to that point. At the beginning, it can matter. The halo effect of top institutions is real. Halo effect in being that people judge you to be smarter than you are. You get more opportunities, good things happen. It's kind of like in the research, taller men and taller women make more money or rated to be more intelligent or rated to be more attractive. That halo effect is real. So yeah, hope that helps guys. I'm gonna turn here. So keep asking these questions. I'll come back to them. And hopefully I've covered the majority of them as we've gone along, but I'll come back to them. I wanna take the questions that we got from our community members, and then we'll come back to yours. And Jeff, let me know if I've answered your questions here, because I know this is something you've been really curious about as well. So, okay, I've got a whiteboard here and I want to pull up, let me flip, do a little flip. Okay, I wanna pull up the questions submissions we got this week. So I've got one here. Okay, we've got somebody who says, they just said they're at the scoping review extraction stage. Okay, I've got more from them. They followed up the question. Whoa, okay. That's not great formatting. Let me move this so you guys can all see it. Okay, hopefully this will come out, but I know you still can't see that. So let me flip the screens around and you still can't see it. Let me zoom in. And I'll read it because I know some of you guys are following along from the car, maybe driving to work, depending on where you are in the world. Okay, so what we got? I'm currently doing a scoping review and I've reached the extraction stage. My pace for extraction is slow as I'm taking my time to understand the outcome measure and results or findings of a particular paper. Good. I would like assistance on the skills of extracting the right outcome with this measure. Additionally, in the findings or results component, my supervisors emphasize taking time to understand how we arrived at the results, particularly stating a clear structure of the findings, that is the test use p-values of post hoc results. I would like to know why these matter in the extraction stage. Okay. So there's a few things to say here. Actually, a lot of things to clarify. So typically, right, you would have set up your scoping review with a kind of model, often a PCC model, which is used frequently in scoping reviews. I'll just do a quick Google and show you guys that. PCC model scoping reviews. And I think this might be the source of confusion. I would have been doing for you a scoping review, I'm sorry, a systematic review, but it's population concept and context. And that might be why you're getting confused. I like systematic review that uses a PICO model where outcome is built in to the model. And I think because this is vague, I think this might be part of what's causing you some confusion. Whoops, trying to zoom in again, but then I zoomed in too much. Population concept context. I don't love scoping reviews, cards on the table, for a number of reasons. I prefer systematic reviews. But, because exactly for the reason that you're highlighting here, it can lead to some confusion. So I would go back and make a PICO for your study. So you want to know your population. You should already know this. And you want to know instead your exposure or intervention or what's going on. What are people being exposed to? You probably don't have a comparison group, so put not applicable and O in outcome. Specify your outcomes. So typically in social science, you'll have the effect of something on something else, like an effect of an X on Y. Effect of this on that. So your outcome is what the effect is on. Like, I want to know the effect of eating ice cream on weight gain, right? So your outcome here is going to be eat weight gain, and this is ice cream that's causing it. So you need to know what that is. And so in your studies, the fact that there are P values tells me you're doing quantitative research and looking at your studies that you've included are looking at the effect of something on something else. And so the P values is telling you, is this statistically significant? It's basically answering, could this have happened by chance alone? What is the probability that if we did this study again, we would have gotten the same results? And so typically what you want to report in your quantitative findings is, is it significant statistically? And how big is the effect? These are not the only ways to deal with it, but you can have something that's statistically significant but means very little. So doctors will often report, for example, we want to save somebody from a heart attack. How many people do we have to treat to save somebody from getting a heart attack? So if something can be significant, say yes, it can be highly, highly significant, yes. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, this is real, but the effect can be small. And that's why doctors will say numbers needed to treat. If we have to treat 10 million people to save one person from a heart attack, it might not be that good a clinical treatment. But if we only need to treat 10 to save one person from a heart attack, that's probably got a pretty big effect that's going to save a lot of lives. So those are usually the two things that you want to pull out. And so kind of core in a review is you've got your own research question that you're trying to answer from the literature. And so you need to strip out and extract all the things of what the papers did and what they found that almost recreate the study. You're kind of atomizing data, the nuts and bolts of the study and pulling out what answers your research question of your review. So it sounds to me there are certain things that you're maybe feeling unclear about. Sounds like maybe you're less familiar reading between the lines with quantitative research because by you saying, I don't know what the outcome measure is, this is creating some confusion for you. So like here, weight gain, let me tell you outcome measure. So weight gain is the outcome. The way weight gain is measured is weight gain measured in kilograms? Is it measured in grams? And maybe who measured it? Was it like by a certain type of scale? Was it a DEXA scan? Or weight gain, was it just like fat percentage? Are there different ways you can measure weight gain? And then not only different ways you can measure the weight gain, but how? How was it measured? Was it a nurse? Did they just put a tape measure around your waist? Did they put you on a scale? Was it a water displacement method? That actually matters because different studies might measure weight gain in different ways and now you're comparing apples and oranges. So other thing to say, if your supervisor wants all this detail here, you might be walking into the reviewers asking you for a meta-analysis, which is a quantitative summary of all these results. And I wouldn't want you to walk into that because it sounds like you're a beginner at this stage. So yeah, if you actually, what would really help is if you submit say one paper and we extract it together. Or of course, I always do encourage, I'm biased of course, our mentorship communities have many examples showing you exactly how to do it, going through real examples. So do consider checking that out as well. Okay, I hope that helps answer your question. Thanks for submitting this because I think it's a really good thing that a lot of people struggle with. I've got another video submission here that I wanna run through. And for some reason, the video questions lately have been showing up with audio that's a little hard to follow, but I'll just send you a little bit of information about the person. And here, okay, it's long here. Hopefully you guys will be able to see this and we'll pivot to the video. Okay, I'll zoom in. So it is, I am Miracle Chica from Nigeria. I discovered your YouTube channel from a Google search today. Awesome, and already submitted for feedback while searching on how to write a research paper. I'm an undergrad, well done for starting research already with a strong interest in doing research in development and environmental sustainability, hot area. I look forward to being an academic and you wanna go to a master's and PhD after I graduate next year. And I wanna start immediately publishing as an undergrad. Awesome, and you're absolutely right. You think it's gonna help you boost your prospects for a scholarship 100% it will. So here's what I wanna help. Being a complete novice, I wanna learn how to start writing high quality papers from the introductory video on our website, cool. I'm excited to know the training offers comprehensive and starts, yeah, we work with complete beginners. So in some ways I prefer beginners because they haven't gotten bad habits yet that you have to undo. It's harder to undo bad habits than just start from scratch. So, and you've got a question about topic. I'd love to understand what should motivate me to choose any specific topic and where to find these topics. Okay, well, you've come to the right place. How do people see research problems to solve in the first place? What are the ways to develop an eye for high yield research problems that need solving and have not been solved already? And finally, I've seen about three or four videos from a YouTube channel and they're informative. Thank you for keeping them free. Yeah, try to provide the most valuable free support to everybody that we can. It's only if you want to work together in a more intimate way that I wish we could do everything for free. But just the operating cost for us to just break even on a nonprofit basis takes more investment because we're able to offer more. I mean, if I had my way, we'd be able to do this all 100% free. This is a passion project for me. And I think people who are inside our community have seen that as well. So these are great questions. These are really great questions because what you've kind of intuitively hit on is what makes top researchers top researchers. Is that in part of my language here, what Ernest Hemingway called having a good shit detector. And when you start out, you don't have a good shit detector. You can't tell what's good and what's bad. What's an important problem? What's not important? That's what separates experts. Experts can get straight to the point and see what's important right away where beginners really struggle with this. And this is what makes choosing a winning topic very, very hard for beginners. And the funny thing is a lot of researchers are just like, oh, go find a topic. Well, that's a really hard to ask for a beginning researcher because they don't have their feet grounded in the field. So what typically happens, we were talking about halo effects earlier, when you're at a top institution, you might have professors who are right at the forefront of their field. They've got a thriving research agenda. They're building this beautiful research tree. And they're like, oh, hey, here's this branch that's about to produce flowers. You go take that branch. And lo and behold, you take that branch and you go produce beautiful flowers. And then you think you're a fantastic genius. But you were just in kind of in the right boat that was going fast and go in the right direction with where the currents were moving. So now that is a good question because we've got a way to short circuit this. So three things I want you to watch. We've got a video on our convergence method. You can find this on convergence method on how to find winning is going to get you in the right topic area. It's going to optimize on three criteria. It's going to want you to get something that's feasible. You can actually do with the skills you have in a short period of time debate. We want you to see that there's a live debate in your area and discussion and you can infer that from citations and recent citations, ideally growing citations in your space. In your neighborhood, something you're passionate about, something that gives you energy that you want to talk about, because research is hard and you're going to have to push through a lot of obstacles, internal obstacles to mindset obstacles to be able to make real progress and thrive. And I think all the researchers in our community know that lots of self-doubt can creep in, lots of imposter syndrome, feeling like you're not good enough. You're not ever going to get there. It's hard when you feel stretched. That's normal. It's normal part of the process. But everybody who's top at some point has had to overcome their own inner resistance and doubt. So that's where passion is really important because it's going to help you through those hard times. So, yeah, use that method. There's several great videos on my channel about it. And then what you need to do if you want to publish kind of the core, we've got a publishability formula, but you need to find a gap in the field and you can do this. You can look in papers, which will actually show you so you can go to the limitations or the sections on future research, often in the discussion, which will tell you what are what needs to be done next in the field. So this can be a low hanging fruit, easy, easy place to look. Depending on your field, environmental science, I think it's often helpful, especially in social sciences, you can look at live debates on what's going on. So you can take take, for example, an environmental debate that's live on the risks associated with fracking to the environment, whether you think fracking is good or bad or not. There is an ongoing debate is probably not resolved, means there's probably some live research there. So also in a simplified way, if a lot of people are talking about something, because in environmental sustainability, there's lots of things like you could ask and there's probably some unresolved research around it. Will windmills, are windmills the right way to solve the energy crisis or should we create different types of rainfall collection to solve water crises or salination plants? Lots of open things that are being discussed that are in a very applied space. And it sounds like you wanted to do something, a more applied energy space. The last thing to say is I do recommend as a first paper doing a lit review, because right now you don't know what you don't know. And so a literature review is often a very nice first paper. And I often recommend for beginners, even people just starting out as a PhD, doing a systematic review, because it's step by step, it's lower risk, it's going to establish your expertise quickly and help you build confidence. So I highly recommend starting with a systematic review. It's going to just get you into good research habits that are going to carry over to everything else that you do next. And let me just make sure I've covered everything. I've got your question here. And I'm going to take your questions as well. Let me just take a breath here and see what Miracle says. OK, guys, this always happens. They're very tough to hear. I hope you guys can hear a little bit, but let's see what Miracle says.

[00:41:50] Speaker 2: I am Miracle Chika from Nigeria, and I have a very quick question. I'm a complete novice in this field, in the field of research. So I want to know, how do people find research problems? Because the notion I have of research is that it's just finding scientific solutions to problems. So how do people get to find these problems in the first place? Because, you know, in my specialization in the area of environmental sustainability, I hardly find research problems around me, especially in my immediate locality. So I want to know how do people get to find these research problems and is there a way to develop an eye for finding research problems? Thank you.

[00:42:37] Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I've talked about it before, like almost being like I'm in Italy. And it's a fun thing to go do is you take these dogs out and they can smell truffles. And the dog just has a nose trained to find a truffle. And I always want you to get that good. I talk about shit detector before I get that nose. And like you can smell out a good research question. And if it's high value and probably don't have that nose yet, you haven't trained it, but you'll get it. Just take take some time like any other skill. Um, but yeah, definitely on my channel, go, uh, watch the videos about how to find winning topics and you'll see training on our convergence method and also training on how to find research gaps for, uh, uh, again, um, if you want to check it, um, we have an entire workflow email me and I can send you one of our really valuable worksheets, which kind of takes you step by step through the process of finding a winning topic, validating it and establishing it to make sure that you're going to be able to find it. Sure. It is publishable before you go too far and then crystallizing it. Um, also using a Pico model, which we were chatting about earlier, you go works, not just for systematic reviews. Um, okay. So let me turn back to your questions. Miracle. Thanks for sending that to us. Really, really great. That helps everyone here. And guys, if you hit like that also will ensure that this video will reach somebody who needs to see it today. Um, that's the magic of YouTube algorithms, but, uh, let's, let's come back. We got some more PhD by publication questions. I've got ed four, four, four S is saying I'm teaching the stats now. Um, yes, I have taught stats in university before. It's something I enjoy. I don't love how stats are taught. I think you got to take the numb out of numbers first in, so you've got three kinds of intuitions. You have conceptual, you kind of have a graphical or geometric intuition and you have a numerical intuition. And I think a lot of stats courses lead with the numerical intuition and they should be leading with the conceptual and visual or graphical or geometric intuition first. And that's how I approach statistics. The other problem I have with statistics training is I think it's important to lead with design. I like to solve problems with data and design rather than fancy statistical analyses. But, uh, this is just my personal philosophy and how I approach training. And you'll see my personal approach to training is different, uh, from a lot of others. So, um, some of you love it, some of you hate it. It's totally okay. You got to find somebody who's training style, uh, resonates with you and how you learn. Uh, and that can be very, very personal. Um, so, uh, yeah. Um, so under asks, do all publications within a PhD by publication need to make a coherent contribution to a single overarching research question? No. You just need kind of a broad topic space where it can all fit. So, for example, Andrea, what I know of your research is you're kind of, for example, you could go broad and say, I'm interested in governing, uh, judicial independence or governing, uh, judicial corruption or something. And then you can have lots of sub research questions that derive out of that broad area that just needs to kind of broadly fit together. There needs to be a coherent thread across the research questions. It's very common. You might have your ideal set up as one research question, lead to another, lead to the next. So, um, a live example here in say a PhD, um, by publication pathway, you might have paper one. Let me, um, let me, let me actually pull up an example. So you might have a, you might have paper, whoops, that's not what I wanted. Let's say a paper, I'm trying to copy and paste. Let's say you have paper one, a systematic review of interventions say, let's just make this concrete. Um, digital gaming interventions in, uh, uh, diabetes population. So let's say somebody did that. Their first paper was a systematic review. Um, and then let's say they did on, on this basis. They then did an observational study on, uh, on, uh, on effects of a digital app on obesity and diabetes risk. So this, this is all starting to fit in the area of digital interventions. And right. So you might have a broad area, digital interventions and chronic disease prevention, maybe right. A very broad area, but you might have a set of papers covering, uh, different sub questions. Maybe then you got a quality, maybe you got now a qualitative study on patient experiences using digital apps and, or something. Get out, look at doctor perceptions or something. I don't know. I'm making something up here. And then you might have a, uh, maybe you have a policy analysis paper on, on potential savings to the UK NHS from digital apps. I don't know. I'm making something up, but this is going to all fit together and you've got different things. You've got a qualitative study. You've got a lit review. You've got a cross-sectional observational study. You've got a policy analysis. Analysis. Um, but they all fit under the same umbrella. If that makes sense. Sometimes I find it helpful to get a little more concrete.

[00:47:53] Speaker 2: Andrea, does that make sense to you?

[00:47:55] Speaker 1: Um, definitely ask me a question if not. Um, okay. We've got Jimmy tele and four. Oh, cool. I'm considering a systematic review, but understand it can be demanding. Would this be the best use of PhD or would another approach be more appropriate? I value your guidance. Listen, we got a live session just a few weeks back on why I recommend systematic reviews as the first paper. Um, we find if you have a good system and you follow it about five to 10 hours a week, you can go start to finish in three months. Is that ambitious? Yes. But I've also got several researchers who invested more than five to 10 hours a week, um, and got it done in a month, month and a half with no background experience doing research. So definitely possible. I mean, experiences are going to vary. Everybody's different, but I, I mean, I won't get in the full argument here. Go check out that live stream. I can't remember the number. It'd have to look as like 38 live stream, 38 or 37. Um, go check it out. It goes into more detail. And I compared different types of lit reviews. You're going to have to do a literature review. Anyway, systematic review is the easiest lit review to publish. It's also, I argue not everybody agrees the easiest one to implement. Um, so check that out. Thanks for asking that question. I love the chicken sounds.

[00:49:16] Speaker 2: Did we have chicken sounds?

[00:49:17] Speaker 1: Gosh, guys, I didn't even know we had chicken sounds. Um, huh. And I'm learning Italian. I do speak Italian. I've been in Italy for a long time. Um, but I don't know about any gosh, guys, my brain must be demented on Friday.

[00:49:35] Speaker 2: I don't remember a chicken sound. Uh, maybe there's stuff going on with the background. I didn't hear.

[00:49:40] Speaker 1: Oh, you mean miracle? Miracle. Yeah. I mean, look guys, I mean, uh, we have people from all over the world. So sometimes I'll have people joining from, it's really a joy joining, uh, from, from like farms in, in rural settings. And I'm really delighted that, uh, this is why I get out of bed in the morning. Like we're able to provide the same high level support that I was providing my students at Harvard. You guys are getting for me the same training that I would give to them. One-to-one and thank you YouTube for making this possible in a way that never was before. Um, and I just stumbled into it during COVID trying to provide online support for students who then invited their friends and suddenly realized, well, why don't we do this for everybody? Uh, so, uh, I'm okay. I'm glad though. You could hear the, the miracles question because it's been low volume. Um, fun with tech, uh, ed for, for, for continues. Um, I feel like talk is cheap. Taking action to write something is more important to keep forward no matter how small stuff you did. Absolutely. Well, you know, you probably noticed, right. Momentum keeps up. It keeps moving. You have momentum where you stop, start, stop, start. That's creates the most friction, um, takes the most energy to, to, to go. So just kind of steady, smooth momentum is, it's really the way forward. And, um, you know, people are used to rewarding themselves on the result. When it comes to scientific work, you've got to reward yourself for the effort you put in because the outcomes and the results are often nonlinear and not really connected. Like you can do a ton of work, but the payoff is going to come. The actual outcome, the result, the paper is going to come much, much later. So you've got to keep rewarding yourself for those, the small baby steps that you take and just show up consistently day after day. Um, guys, uh, I think we are coming to a good stopping point, uh, for today. Uh, you know, um, let me just see if I can dig this up while we're here. So I can tell you the exact one. Guys, if you go into my YouTube channel and, uh, look up, you'll see a tab. I'm doing this now, uh, live. So you can follow along with me, look up the tab on live. You should see live and dissertation planning. One-on-one was number 41 and the why systematic reviews are the safest first paper is number I have to go back is number 36 was workshop number 36. Um, I can say, I might need to update title for that to be there. Um, but, uh, yeah, um, the live, so there's a rich menu of live streams. Sometimes I have to navigate them, but if you ever can't find something you're looking for, um, drop a question, drop a question guys. And the question link, I always send it out with these videos, but let me send you a QR. So if you're interested in checking out our research communities, here's a QR code for that. If you like the way we work, join over 200 members, we all help each other. Jeff is there. Andrea is there. That's really fantastic people. It's a pleasure for me to get to work with people from all over the world. Even sometimes you get to hear a cute animal sounds in the background. Um, so really a lot of fun. Here's the video question link. Um, if you want to submit a video question, my favorite format is video question, because it just makes everything real to be able to see and hear each other, um, send that along. If you're nervous about the video, I mean, you can just take a quick video with your phone, just send a document or a question. Be as clear as you possibly can. And, uh, I'll review that as well. Um, and I'll go through the last questions and then we will wrap up and call it a day. Jeff says, I got questions answered. Awesome. Jeff, uh, love to hear it. You guys are, are some of you going down a PhD by publication path? Are you thinking about it now? Um, how many of you are actually working on papers that could form a part of the PhD by publication portfolio? Um, how many papers have you published or have in progress right now? Let me know in the chat below. Uh, I read and respond personally to every comment that comes through during the stream and after. So I know that a lot of you are on team replay, maybe in Australia or in Latin America and the time zones can be prohibitive. Um, try to cover, get the best coverage we can, but, um, do comment. I do read and reply. Um, and, um, yeah, I can see we've got a couple of comments. People saying they've got some papers in progress and a couple published. Yeah. So I'll follow up with you, uh, after the session, if this is something you're interested in, I've got a short primer document to that, uh, myself or one of our assistants can link you up with that goes into a little bit. More detail about this pathway. I'm, I'm kind of pleasantly surprised how many, how many people are interested, genuinely interested in, um, this PhD by publication pathway. And I think it was a sign of the times that the world of education is changing very rapidly and our institutions are a bit dinosaurs in ways, uh, trying to respond and keep up with those changes. Uh, we have accounting analytic Academy, five, six, one, five says, Hey, Brock is a new faculty member. I genuinely enjoy teaching, but I find research, especially the pressure to publish and talk to your journals, less fulfilling any tips. Oh, great question. Yeah. The, I mean, the publisher parish culture is really real. Uh, it's a rite of passage now as a new faculty member. I don't know if you're on the tenure track, uh, faculty members I work with. We often, depending on which field, trying to develop a strategy to cash in on publications and get grants. Um, and, uh, get to tenure faster. Um, but yeah, some faculty come in really wanting to do it for the love of science. And then they realize, Oh, I'm getting hit with a lot of teaching, but, and I love teaching, but I have so much pressure to publish and the teaching is taking me away from publishing and top tier journals. And, oh, and I've got to supervise a lot of students who don't have any hope of publishing and that's taking me away from what I need to do in my own career to get ahead. And that can be really tricky to balance. Um, so the things we do with early career researchers is we often think about having research pipelines. So not one paper, but a string of papers. We focus on how to break you away from the one to one trap of you being one, uh, paper, you know, one research with like one project, one paper, and one exhausted researcher to try to get leverage in the system. So you might have, uh, one project and might have like four to five research questions associated, creating a pipeline and multiple researchers who can slot into it. And you actually see with more senior faculty, ultimately most of them today, that is the structure that they've moved to as science has moved to a more complex interdisciplinary teams. And yes, there was a time where I had the great man or woman of science doing everything themselves, but that model is an antiquated model by now. And most of the rising stars that I see today are moving into this more lab style chain of command, almost like running a small business. And then coming in as an early faculty member, there's this cliche of like, what got you here won't get you there. And I find a lot of, uh, early faculty, uh, have, have navigated well to get to where they are, but they're not really equipped with the skills or training to get to the next step. So, um, if you're interested, if you could share a little bit more with me, I think this would be a really fun session to do, uh, together. Maybe this will be a good live for next week. Um, but yeah, if you share a little bit more about the struggles, um, last thing I say on it is, uh, I've got a really good video on my channel, um, that goes into more detail about this and this is not a live session. That's why I thought this might be an interesting one to do. It is the, uh, let me, let me just send you the link here and, uh, my video editor Gleb comes up with these kind of click baity titles, but, uh, try, I don't know if you'll be able to see this, but, uh, I'll put it here. Now that's not gonna be clickable. Um, but anyway, I popped it in the chat. Um, and it's like how you can publish faster while working less. So a little bit quick baby, but really true. Uh, really true. And, um, one, one researcher I'm working with now we've created actual SOPs so that we've established in her lab. She has one of her postdocs who does kind of the final check on manuscripts. So she gets manuscripts that are 80, 90% done instead of before she was getting 40 and 50% done, saved a bunch of time. Also introduced some systems so that she could establish that the figure and tables and the story paper was right. Creating results sets or pushing those along also save a whole bunch of time. Um, so some, some small little tweaks in your workflow can end up getting huge size time savings and keep you from feeling that real sense of overwhelm that can happen as an early stage researcher. So thanks for sending that very long answer. Um, a lot more to say there, and we might save that for another session. Guys, we are right at the hour. Thanks for today, wherever you are. Hope you have a fantastic weekend and a well-deserved refreshing break. Actively get some rest. It's more important than, uh, we sometimes realize or give credit to. And I will look forward to seeing you soon.