This article considers issues that continue to shape doctoral education in Australia in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of relevant issue, and to identify opportunities for future research. It describes examples of responses taken at an institutional level, and their implications for the norms and…

Although there has been considerable "post hoc" research on student views of supervisors, there is little on how candidate expectations are constituted at or close to the point of commencement. This study reads students' commentary about the 'ideal supervisor' at the point of institutional induction to examine commencing candidate…

Purpose: This study aims to reflect on "good practices" in doctoral research supervision and transfer the author's experience to other academics. The author explains the sources of his approach to doctoral research supervision drawing on traditional practice in adult learning and some reference to phenomenology as a "meeting of…

In Australia, only two-thirds of doctoral students finish their degrees, with underrepresented students completing at even lower rates. Students who successfully complete still experience many challenges throughout their degrees. In this narrative literature review, we use "preparation and readiness for the doctorate" as a framework to…

Current understandings of the expectations and educational needs of commencing PhD students are based on research focusing on the retrospective recollections of middle or late-stage candidates about the extent to which their expectations at entry were met. This article explores the prospective expectations of 199 commencing PhD students at the…

Higher Degree by Research (HDR) students are an important part of Australian university research culture. They contribute significantly to the generation of new knowledge, research outputs, industry engagement and the continual development of higher education. This article is the first to systematically review existing research to synthesise the…

This article provides a description and analysis of the way in which research degree students and their supervisors at one Australian university (the University of South Australia) use a popular online plagiarism-detection system, iThenticate. The study identifies how these two groups use iThenticate by analysing usage data together with data from…

This research explored the academic and non-academic lived experiences of higher degree onshore international doctoral students studying in one Australian university. While the academic dimension of experiences included curricular, resource, research and supervision issues, the non-academic dimension focussed on students' inter-personal…

Purpose: Little is known about the impact external Viva examiners coming from the international community of scholars have on the quality of PhD research. This study aims to argue that the encounter between local and international examiners (IEs) is subject to various complexities, raising doubts about whether IEs' participation and approval of…

While higher education (HE) is entrenched as a context for scholarly inquiry in Australian universities, there remains contest about it as a research field. Unlike other forms of 'Education', in Australia there is no undergraduate programme inducting students into HE's key questions, scholars, and inquiry modes. For new doctoral students, learning…

Feedback from supervisors on written work is the primary tool for teaching writing in postgraduate research and is a pedagogical activity for academic writing development. Despite this, little effort is focussed on teaching supervisors to provide effective feedback, or students to understand and use this feedback (feedback literacy). Here we…

The formation of emerging doctoral scholarly identities has received significant attention in recent Education research, some of which is situated within the spatial turn that seeks to understand the impact of space and place upon identity and pedagogy. In this research project, involving analysis of PhD thesis acknowledgements written in 1980, we…

Australia has among the highest percentages of international English as an additional language background (EAL) university students worldwide and this is steadily increasing. These students contribute immensely to Australia's and the Asia-Pacific regional economy, research and cultural creativity. Despite this, EAL students face serious academic…

The COVID-19 pandemic has posed a real -- albeit rare -- test for human and organisational resilience worldwide, including those in the higher education sector. In this paper, I reflect on my observations of the pandemic's impacts that have rippled through the university sector in Australia in the first three quarters of 2020. The pandemic has not…

International students are aspirational and expectant of their learning improving the quality of their life. The stress from academic pressure and acculturative challenges exasperates them from fully experiencing a quality higher educational experience. Despite this, they continuously strive to learn and adjust as they construct their academic…