Process of research

“I think what happens too often is that all the mentoring is around the substantive issues, the content. Mentoring might have somewhat of a blind spot on the process of research, like managing your personal workload, understanding the unwritten rules of the field, working through a reasonable process, that has boundaries, that is focused.

I think part of making that more transparent to new supervisees in particular is to formalize it. To make explicit ideas such as “What constitutes a theory?”, “What is an audience?”, “How do you structure papers?” These kinds of things—formal work taken in as part of the curriculum, not just role-modelling, but actual formalization—helps supervisors (and in turn students) to internalize these ideas.”

(Steven Floyd)