What are major challenges in writing the first paper? Evidence from interviews with supervisors and doctoral students

Abstract

Attrition rates of doctoral students are high and generally vary between 30 and 50%. High student attrition can greatly affect the life and careers of students and supervisors andis costly for the science system and society in general. Much of the literature so far has classified the underlying problems to student attrition according to their alleged sources. For example, students identify problems like characteristics of the study programmes or unclear expectations and lack of support from the department. At the same time, supervisors identify problems to be on the doctoral student side, such as low independence, lack of key competences or low motivation.

Research introduces many new challenges to new PhD students that can become overwhelming. One such challenge is scientific writing, which students have limited training in from their basic degree. In our group, we have encountered PhD students who struggle with scientific writing and can sometimes go to great lengths to avoid writing. Therefore, in this interview-based report we focus on the writing process and rather than identifying the sources of the encountered problems we ask doctoral students and supervisors what they believe are the major challenges and how these can be overcome. Moving from sources of problems to the challenges, we provide practical and anticipative insight into how supervisors can effectively help doctoral students to deal with these challenges. Since the doctoral students’ learning curve is arguably steepest during their early phases, we focus on the activity of writing the first paper.

Our results show that supervisors and students alike emphasized that identifying the contribution to the scientific literature is a major challenge for PhD students. In addition, most of the other challenges with writing were directly coupled to this central challenge. We summarise our findings in two main strategies for supervision: 1) The expanding autonomy strategy, in which the student is initially a co-author in papers and gradually increases and gains independence. But where it is important to assure that the student doesn’t remain dependent; and 2) The autonomy early on strategy, where the supervisor needs to be aware of the fact that doctoral students may find it hard or impossible to identify and assess their contribution in particular in the early phases of their PhD, and takes measures accordingly and based on the students individuality.