Doctoral Education and Training

Abstract

The title of the article stresses that the phase of doctoral candidacy generally consists of study (education) and practical (research) training. Research about doctoral education and training is concerned with multiple aspects of the doctorate or PhD, such as knowledge generation in supervised situations of learning, quality assurance, completion and attrition, disciplinary differences, careers, and publication outputs. In addition to being multi-thematical, a bibliography about doctoral education and training has to deal with several other challenges. Among these challenges are the heterogeneity and national specificities of doctoral education and training, which result in huge numbers of publications, which make the selection of which publications to present rather difficult. Therefore, the publications presented in this article are selected based on the two goals of presenting an overview about and to highlight core areas of study of doctoral education and training. For the overview several edited volumes are presented (first goal). The edited volumes contain mostly articles with a national focus, sometimes addressing just one part of the world (e.g., Asia) and sometimes several parts of it. The second goal, to highlight core areas of study of doctoral education and training, is supported by a bibliometric study. Based on the bibliometric study, the co-word analysis sketches three topic clusters arranged around a loophole in the middle generating the image of a doughnut of doctoral education and training topics. The image of the doughnut is a representation of (a) the diversity of research about doctoral education and training and (b) the several themes in research about doctoral education and training being somewhat disconnected from each other. The topics are knowledge and skills development of PhD candidates, contextual (macro) issues such as PhD study, career, disciplinary, national, and university differences. The bibliometric co-citation analysis helped identify five clusters of major themes in the study of doctoral education and training: Knowledge generation in supervised situations of learning; completion and attrition in US graduate education, and disciplinary differences; productivity and outcomes of doctoral education and training with focus on careers and publications; psychological studies on the relationship between super(ad)visors and doctoral candidates; research productivity and careers; and academic writing cultures and English as a second language. For each of the five clusters the ten most co-cited publications are included in this article. The article concludes by discussing the theoretical approaches to studying doctoral education and training.