Why doctoral students should use reference software

This may lead to continuous destructive friction between students and the learning environment, which in turn, may lead to problems in their well-being. Mental distress may have a negative impact and lead to withdrawal, even with highly selected undergraduate students [ 57 ]. Lonka et al. Could such signs of dysfunction be related to ideas of withdrawing from the PhD study process?

Recently, Stubb et al. The Finnish doctoral candidates in question perceived scholarly community as a burden slightly more often than as inspiration and empowerment. Moreover, their feelings of empowerment were positively related to their study engagement and negatively related to their levels of stress, exhaustion, and anxiety. Previous studies of doctoral experiences have shown that not only are attrition rates high among doctoral students [ 60 , 61 ], but also the distress during the studies is high [ 62 , 63 ].

Previous research on doctoral students suggests that the experience of PhD training may depend heavily on the learning environment provided by the scholarly community [ 68 — 71 ]. This environment may either promote well-being and satisfaction or encourage dysfunctional emotions and withdrawal from studies [ 72 — 74 ].

Can and Walker [ 75 ] recently showed that in addition to the content of feedback students frequently considered the tone of feedback highly important in terms of their willingness to learn about the feedback and edit their texts. Hence, feedback received from the supervisor and other members of the scholarly community is likely to contribute emotions students experienced during their studies and hence their studying persistence while facing challenges and problems.

The present study aimed to explore the factors that may hinder a successful PhD process. This study focuses on exploring the following questions. The study is part of a larger national research project — on PhD education in Finland [ 76 ]. In Finland, a doctoral degree entails a thesis, seminars, coursework from 40 to 80 ECTS, depending on the discipline , and a public defense of thesis. Students must apply for a doctoral education. However, once obtaining the right to pursue doctoral studies, the license has until very recently been valid for life.

Doctoral education is publicly funded and costs the student nothing. However, students do not automatically receive funding for their studies by launching their doctoral project [ 77 ]. The emphasis in doctoral programs is on conducting doctoral research. The coursework in doctoral studies is usually constructed individually based on personal study plans that typically include international conferences and methodological studies. Doctoral thesis can be pursued either in the form of a monograph or as a summary of articles [ 78 ].

The summary of articles consists of three to five depending on the discipline articles published in peer-reviewed scientific journals and a short summary, including an introduction and discussion. The student has at least one advisor a full professor in the field in which the thesis is being completed and one supervisor. Also, the use of supervisory boards has become more popular [ 79 ].

This part of the study included survey data collected from three faculties at the University of Helsinki, the faculty of Arts, including Fenno-Ugrian, Scandinavian and modern languages, world cultures, art studies, and philosophy; the faculty of Medicine; and the Faculty of Behavioural Sciences, including psychology, educational sciences, phonetics, and teacher education.

Altogether female: ; male: ; mean age: 41; med: The total response rate was We compared our sample to all Finnish PhD students in terms of gender and age based on the statistics gathered by the University of Helsinki and Statistics Finland Table 1.

The comparison showed our sample was well representative of the population in terms of gender distribution. In terms of mean age, students from the humanities and behavioural sciences who completed the survey seemed slightly younger than the average, whereas students from medicine who completed the survey appeared slightly older than the average. Students who had completed more than two-thirds of the thesis process, were somewhat overrepresented, perhaps because these students had more experience, and therefore they may have felt that they could participate in the study.

Furthermore, in the absence of detailed national level statistics on Finnish doctoral students, we analysed the representativeness of our sample by comparing it to a larger national survey of Finnish doctoral students in all domains [ 80 , 81 ]. The working conditions were also quite similar to the larger national study. Our sample differed from the larger national study only in that the majority of students who answered our survey were estimated to be in the last third of their doctoral process, whereas most of the respondents in the national survey were in the early stages.

The PhD student survey, conducted in May , consisted of both Likert-type statements and open-ended questions. The survey was sent to all doctoral students in the faculties of medicine, humanities and behavioural sciences. The contact information of the students was collected from the student register database. Students who did not have Finnish as their mother tongue received the questionnaire in English. The PhD student survey contained a total of 81 questions: 8 open-ended questions, 55 Likert-scale statements one item from the learning environment scale was excluded from a construction summary of the variables , and 18 background variables.

The survey took about 30—45 minutes to complete. What kind of problematic situations, questions, or challenges do you find typical of the PhD process? MED NORD questionnaire has served in various contexts, such as teacher education and medical education [ 85 ], and it was modified to fit the PhD context. A Likert scale ranging from 1 do not agree to 5 fully agree was used for all questions except the one-item stress scale, whose alternatives varied from 1 not at all to 5 very much.

Moreover, background variables were explored to determine whether perceived well-being differed between those students who had considered interrupting their studies and those who had not. The open-ended question on problems students encounter during their doctoral studies was content analysed using an abductive strategy, which was thus compatible with the hermeneutic circle: dialogue between theoretical presumptions and phenomena manifested in the empirical data was continuous.

Empirical findings and theoretical ideas took turns, gradually completing each other and resulting in the final categories. At the end of each analysis phase, the research group validated the categories resulting from the content analysis [ 86 , 87 ].

Moreover, the ecological validity of the findings was verified in pedagogical courses. This approach was also applied in some previous studies [ 88 , 89 ].

The categories of the qualitative content analysis, including problems reported by the doctoral students, were cross-tabulated with the each study domain three faculties to indicate the possible relation between these variables.

Relations were tested with a Chi-square test significance level. Also of interest was whether the well-being of students who had considered withdrawing from study differed from that of students who had not.

We carried out an independent sample two tailed -test to measure the significance between the two groups. The results suggested that problems the students reported, ranging from problems in domain-specific research to more general questions about becoming a member of the scholarly community, varied widely. Although the participants were quite mature, and the average age of our doctoral students was around 40, they reported few problems outside of academic life. Students emphasised the acquisition of generic skills, for instance, in self-regulated learning, maintaining motivation, self-efficacy beliefs and time management, and in motivation and issues related to their developing identity as a researcher.

It is challenging to stand alone and learn to be independent and also to tolerate loneliness in research work. In the end, you have to decide everything by yourself. This is how I see it P The dialogues with my supervisors and other PhD students have been the most beneficial for me. The clear definition of the data was also crucial, but I would really have needed much more intervention from my supervisors earlier on. Also, the clear bounds and definitions between work and PhD research early in the starting phase would have quickened my research I worked as a research assistant in the beginning of my career H The problem is My relationship with my supervisor.

There is a power relationship between a PhD student and a supervisor, because a PhD student is dependent on supervisors in many different ways employment contracts etc. The problems within the category supervision and scholarly community were often related to a lack of supervision or to destructive friction in the supervisor relationship. Students also found the lack of scholarly community and social support problematic. In addition, some students described academic abuse, such as discrimination based on sex and verbal abuse, and violations of research ethics, including authorship issues and the unauthorised use of data by the supervisor or other members of research group, as problematic.

The most seldom expressed problems were related to facilities and financial preconditions for conducting PhD studies, such as a lack of sufficient funding or resources.

Scholarships are often really small. Perhaps there are too many PhD students in relation to available financing. The research groups may also employ new PhD students despite having only short-time financing P The results further indicated that the four study domains varied in terms of the kind of problems students reported in their own PhD process. The relationship between the domain and the perceived problems was statistically significant , , and.

The problems related to acquiring academic expertise were most often mentioned as the first priorities of doctoral students in all faculties.

Students in the Faculty of Behavioural Sciences most often considered questions related to supervision and social interaction within the scholarly community to be problematic; PhD students in the Faculty of Arts most often emphasised resource problems.

The results show that the reliability Alpha for each scale was satisfactory. All Alpha levels exceeded 0. The mean values of these variables were not exceptionally high.

The participants, however, varied. Lack of interest was reported less often than stress, exhaustion, and anxiety. Table 5 shows that students who had considered withdrawing from their studies suffered more from anxiety and exhaustion, and scored higher on self-evaluated stress than did students who had not considered withdrawing from their studies.

The former students also reported significantly lower levels of interest in their studies. The problems most often reported were related to general work processes.

Within this category, the majority of the problems were related to self-regulation, motivation, and self-efficacy, possibly because domain-specific problems are more often at the core of supervision and academic practices, and are therefore more easily identified and solved than are problems related to self-regulation or identity.

Accordingly, our results suggest that more attention should be focused on generic work processes in developing the pedagogical practices of doctoral education. The next most common problems were related to supervision and the scholarly community. This finding sets high demands on the pedagogy of doctoral education, especially its development towards more collaborative education. This includes developing coauthoring practices in which explicated, process-oriented, and constructive feedback is provided for the doctoral students [ 91 — 93 ].

Only one-fifth of the participants reported problems with the financial preconditions of conducting their PhD studies as their primary concern. This may be because most students in Finland registered as full-time PhD students strive towards getting funding. Competition for scholarships is tight, and doctoral students must continuously apply to various funds, foundations, and institutions for them. The three faculties also showed significant variation.

Interestingly, problems in supervision and the scholarly community were the ones PhD students in the behavioural sciences education, psychology, and teacher education mentioned most often, possibly because doctoral students in these domains are experts in learning, teaching, and pedagogy, and may therefore be especially sensitive to educational practices and communication problems.

Questions related to general work processes, however, appeared much more important to PhD students from all three faculties. Those who had considered interrupting their PhD studies were more stressed and suffered more often from anxiety and exhaustion than students who had not considered withdrawing.

As in previous studies, lack of interest appeared to be an indicator for dropout risk [ 95 , 96 ]. We recommend supervisors to focus more on the personal study plans and encourage students to consider seriously their personal aims in doctoral studies.

If doctoral students are able to influence their route towards a doctorate and to construct it meaningfully, their study experiences will be more personally meaningful to them. Accordingly, problems that the doctoral students emphasised can be considered primarily as pedagogical in nature rather than mainly financial or political. You can sign up for a Mendeley account online and install the Mendeley Desktop Tool in your computer. You can import papers into Mendeley library from your hard drive by simply dragging and dropping files.

You can also import reference list from other reference managers or by searching various web databases for papers through Mendeley Literature Search. You can also use Mendeley Web Importer, a browser plugin that allows you to import documents from anywhere on the web quickly.

Mendeley desktop will display a PDF icon next to the paper if the full text is available. You can search annotate and add notes to PDF documents. You can sync your libraries to the cloud to access them anywhere. Mendeley Writing Addins are available for MS Word and LibreOffice which enables you to insert references into your article and generate a bibliography list. EndNote EndNote is a reference management tool that allows you to import references directly from online sources such as PubMed, Web of Science, Library of Congress, etc.

You can also import references by uploading a list of references in Citation Manager format. Alternatively, you can manually input the references if it is an unpublished source.

You can insert references in the document as you write using EndNote Word Addin. EndNote supports numerous citation formats. The tool automatically generates the bibliography for the references contained in the text. RefWorks is a reference management software quite similar to EndNote. RefWorks is web-based as in the reference database is stored online. The references can be accessed and updated from any computer with an internet connection. Institutions subscribe to RefWorks on behalf of all their students, faculty and staff.

This plugin allows users to insert references in the text and generate a bibliography in a wide variety of formats. Citavi Citavi is a reference management tool that combines referencing with task management. Citavi allows users to search for sources, analyze content, structure ideas and write a paper.

When you find information on the web, you can use Citavi browser plugin to import quotations, pictures, and web pages to Citavi library. You can annotate PDFs and save pictures to Citavi library. You can also make a note of your thoughts while reading a research paper using Citavi Thoughts Option.

You can add tasks to the tasks manager window to manage project deadlines. You can structure your paper by creating an outline in Citavi. Then you can drag and drop references, image, and quotations to relevant sections of the paper. Finally, you can download the paper outline as a Word document and start filling in the missing bits of the paper. Be sure to take advantage of the features offered by these programs to make your research just a little bit easier.

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I want to sound professional and to get hired. I have a resume, letter, email, or personal document that I need to have edited and proofread. Toggle navigation. Infographics Videos Podcasts Articles. Written by Scribendi Students, academics, authors, and researchers generally have to do a lot of online research. Flowcite Flowcite helps researchers manage every aspect of academic writing, including research, reference management, collaborative writing, annotating, editing, and publishing.

RefWorks RefWorks is an exceptional reference management software program. Zotero Zotero is both free and open source, which means that you don't have to pay for it and that its design is publicly accessible. EndNote EndNote is great if you're collaborating on a research paper. Mendeley If you're in a technical or scientific field, Mendeley is an excellent option for you.

Citationsy Citationsy is a great choice because it's so adaptable.