DON'T PANIC

When I was an undergraduate, we always talked about 'fifth week blues': the point in term where you were just about halfway through, and there was so much work to be done you couldn't even imagine ever finishing it all, and you were probably about to come down with something horrible.

Well, I'm thinking that in graduate terms, it happens a couple of weeks later. Both this term and last, at about this time, end of sixth week and beginning of seventh, I've started to feel as though the whole world is coming crashing down on me. I'm wondering why I started this, I'm raking through the job adverts to see what else I could do with my life, and I'm feeling like there's no way that I can complete a doctorate, or even at this rate get started on one properly. I suspect that the reason for this is that there are only a couple of weeks to go to the end of term, and when you sit down and assess where you are, and where you can reasonably expect to be by the end of term, it feels like you've accomplished sod all.

I was trying to guard against this at the beginning of term by completing a weekly DPhil log, showing all the things I'd done related to education each week, and highlighting the ones which were specifically relevant to my doctorate. Unfortunately falling ill for a week in the middle of the term meant taking a week off and failing to fill in the log document. I haven't done one for either of the last two weeks. It's all too easy as a graduate student, especially as a first year DPhil, to feel that you're not really making any progress. You go from day to day reading and writing about your topic, but not really achieving much in the way of solid work. I'm feeling this particularly because I'm still waiting for a meeting to try to negotiate access for my research. In four months time I need to be doing pilot work, or there won't be a project to do. This is making me very nervous.

So I'm here in the computer lab trying to write an early literature review to present to my fellow first years, and wondering at what point I should start to panic, which is preventing me doing much constructive reading and reviewing. On top of academic concerns are my worries about where I can afford to live next year, and what on earth to do about that. The only thing I can do to prevent myself from wanting to quit and run away home at the moment is relive over and over in my head the worst parents' evening encounters I ever had, to remind myself of why I'm doing this and not sitting in a cosy classroom reading a nice Shakespeare play right now.

Reviewing the situation

So, having handed in my own abstract mere hours before the deadline, I'm now in the situation of reviewing other people's abstracts. And given the difficulty I had writing one, it's surprisingly easy to spot the strengths and weaknesses of those of others. In fact, it's a deeply educative experience. It's also surprisingly similar to, for example, looking at job applications or coursework essays. What makes or breaks any of these things is how well they hit the criteria: criteria which should be attainable by anyone.

1) Word count. If it says 200 it means 200. Not fifty. Not four hundred. Submitting anything by email makes it very easy for the recipient to check the length these days. With job applications it's more likely to suggest one or two pages for a letter. Change the margins, change the font, change the spacing. All fine. Don't go onto that next sheet.
2) Spelling. Spell check is easy. A quick read is easy. Do you really want your abstract out there in the world with a mistake directly under your name for everyone to see and hanging round your neck for ever more?
3) It's seems to be amazingly easy not to actually say what you're going to say. Abstracts have to tell prospective audience members exactly what to expect. When giving tips for theses abstracts, which are slightly different but not much, a lecturer pointed out that academic papers are not murder mysteries: you don't have to carefully conceal whodunnit. In fact, in abstracts, you need to give away all your major suprises up front. It might not be romantic, but it is good practice.
4) Explain what you're talking about. Don't assume people will work out your theoretical perspective, your definitions or your acronyms off their own bat.

In fact, I've come to the conclusion that you could do worse than use Goldilocks and the Three Bears as a model for writing abstracts. Not too big and not too small, it has to be just right. Not too hard and not too soft, it has to be just right. And then, if you're lucky, the three bears of conference organisers won't gobble you up (okay, so slight pushing of Goldilocks, but it's late, and I've just reviewed a bunch of abstracts).

Abstract thoughts

I'll start with a small embarrassed cough. *ahem*.It's only been three months since my last post, I don't know what you're talking about. Although since everyone who speaks at our first year DPhil seminars keeps telling us that we ought to be writing 500 words a day about our research, it is a little embarrassing.

Speaking of embarrassing, so is being on a conference committee and being very lax in getting your abstract submitted. The deadline is about six hours from now, and I just managed to get it in, some weeks after the original call for papers. One of the problems of writing an abstract for a paper you intend to give is that although you may have some idea about what you're going to say, it's not all fully formed yet. An abstract can give you some ideas, but it can also tie you down once you've been accepted and have to sit down and actually write the whole damn paper.

Being a first year, I don't have any results (or indeed any anything) yet, so what's the point of giving a paper at a conference? Well, firstly, this is a student conference, designed to help us develop our presentation skills, get feedback on both them and our projects, and also to practice submitting abstracts for consideration. The abstract is blind peer reviewed, which is also a nice piece of professional development. For this conference, STORIES (STudents' Ongoing Research In Education Studies), the abstract length was only 150 words, but even that much was leaving me with serious writers' block. I'd taken the advice of a second year, and decided to present on potential methodologies for my study. But that was as far as it went.

Luckily that second year had some more tips: a secret formula lightly mentioned in passing by her supervisor. The recipe is as follows:

• First paragraph = introduce the topic
• Second paragraph = introduce the problem
• Third paragraph = say what you're actually going to talk about

And just like that, it flowed from the keyboard. Now all I have to do is worry about what my blind peer reviewer is going to say about it.

Finding the literature - never mind reviewing it

The first part of any research project appears to be extensive reading on and around your topic. Or any topic which might be vaguely related or in fact interesting in some way, or indeed extensive reading around a topic which is in no way related to your doctorate but looks jolly interesting, and it was okay to spend all day reading these two novels, wasn't it?

Finding the right kind of literature is not always easy. Lots of emphasis was placed on the importance of 'systematic' searching: that is to say making a search which doesn't miss anything and which could be repeated by someone else. This is jolly fine and good and totally necessary but often the most helpful search strategy is the entirely serendipitous one of finding something useful and then chasing up every reference within it and also, for the more advanced among us, finding all articles which cite it (Social Science Citation Index is useful for this, as is the more limited Google Scholar). There should be a name for this search technique, but there isn't one. Perhaps 'spiderweb searching' or 'node-based searching'. Because while systematic searching may be designed to ensure that you don't miss anything, in fact it can have the opposite effect, if you are not prepared to follow those results up with the spiderweb technique (I'm determined to coin this term).

There are perils involved in following up these kinds of leads. Last year I found a very interesting sounding article, which purported to be nice and basic and just the kind of thing I needed, cited by its author in a later paper. Searching for it on the internet I discovered that while the article itself was not available online, another eight or so people had cited it in exactly the same way as the original author. There was just one problem. When I went to the paper based copy of the journal, hidden away in my department's library's archives, the article wasn't there. The right issue was, and the right pages, but they were occupied with an entirely different article which, while not being entirely useless per se, was of no use to my research project whatsoever. After a laborious handsearching process I found it in another issue with different page numbers. But I must be the first person to cite it who has actually read it: the others all merely took what its author had said about its content and followed his citation. Which is a big no-no as anyone involved in any kind of research should know.

Well, that was last year, and last year's problem. This year's is entirely different: most of the work which has already been done in the area which I'm researching has been done by Cambridge Assessment, the lovely group made up of the OCR awarding body and Cambridge International Examinations, and their research arm. In another life, OCR was UCLES - the University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate (which strangely is the name all their money remains in) - and in that guise produced a report for the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority on the reliability of marking in Key Stage 3 tests, in the course of which they did some experiments on the use of annotation. This report is cited over and over again by Cambridge Assessment people working in my field, and they presumably have copies of it kicking about in filing cabinets all over the place. If it was produced nowadays it would be bunged straight on the internet, but it's a few years old and it wasn't. And there are no copies to be found anywhere. Not in the copyright libraries, not on any catalogues, not on the internet, nowhere. Which leaves me in the not so comfortable position of wanting to cite a study which I can't actually lay my hands on... hypocrite? Moi?

I guess I will have to resort to something else which has been muttered about in the last couple of weeks (mostly by over-confident North American Continent students) which is emailing the people who wrote the articles I'm reading. I mean, presumably they had their hands on it? In fact, tomorrow I will be at Cambridge Assessment at a seminar on Equating (with the worrying instruction of 'bring your calculator'), so perhaps I can use my cover as mild-mannered DPhil student to do an Alias and search the filing cabinets while wearing impossibly tight clothes, stupidly high heels and an implausibly coloured wig. Ah well, a girl can dream.

Frontline research, or 'Rationale'

I've been a doctoral student for a whole month now, and I'm beginning to feel the need for a blog. On a day to day basis there are two major risks as a research student: the first is that you feel that you're not achieving anything or getting anywhere; the second is the risk that you really aren't doing anything much. This blog is primarily designed to protect me against both of these risks. It will be a record of what I've been up to, on a regular basis, and it will also allow me to reflect on some of the issues pertinent to social science research and to doctoral students.

Why not just keep a diary then? Well, one reason is that I'm vain enough to think that it would be nice if someone read this. And perhaps if they did they might be putative doctoral students or other doctoral students and sharing some experiences might be a postitive support: knowing you're not in it alone is a major help. Secondly, the blog has a major advantage over a diary: it's searchable. So if in a year's time I need to find all the mentions of literature reviews, for example, I can.

A third reason is my own background: it's quite natural for me to write through anything that happens to me. Two weeks ago our cohort had a session on academic writing, and one of the things that emerged was that to a large extent being an academic means being a writer. Writing isn't something that comes at the end of a study, it's something that you do all along. We were encouraged to write every day, to practice our academic writing and to sift, digest and rationalise our thinking. Professor Geoffrey Walford has described himself as a 'compulsive writer' (I think in Doing Qualitative Educational Research: a personal guide to the research process, 2001, London, Continuum), and I think I tend towards that camp too.

So here it is: part compulsion, part self-help, part support. Dispatches from life as a beginning academic; honest reporting of the perils of friendly fire from supervisors, coalitions of the willing with fellow students, and embedded reporting from the frontline of the doctoral experience.