Username: karlyna     Send personal mail

Subject area: Social Sciences

Department: Psychology

Pursuing degree: Doctoral

School start date: 09/2009

Expected/Completed graduation date: 05/2014

Stage of research: Course Work

Participation

• Badges:

  

• Questions: (3)

  I hear people talking about funding for dissertations. What exactly do you use the funding for and how early is right to start looking for it? I'm in my first semester of my Ph.D. program in Educational Psychology. If your school is supposedly "fully funding" you by giving you tuition remission and a stipend, do you still need to look for these funds?

  I have been using RefWorks since I was an undergraduate. I think I may still have access to my RefWorks account with my undergraduate institution; is it possible to somehow transfer the information from that account to my new RefWorks account at my graduate institution?

  What kinds of things can I be doing in my first year as a Ph.D. student to get ahead rather than wasting time?

• Answers: (2)

  How do you assure that the information you use for your literature review is empirical and not just and opinion piece?

  The last response is pretty accurate. A fast way to know the difference is to ask this question: Did the author(s) conduct a study, or did they only report what others have already done? If there was a study, there should be a method section, and the abstract will most likely discuss the results of the study the author(s) conducted.  If a study was done, it's empirical. If it just reports other people's findings, it's probably a review, which is not exactly what you want to be citing since you're supposed to be conducting a review yourself...use those papers as jump-off points for finding the empirical pieces you need to construct your review.  You can cite similar articles as other reviews, but you want to have original conclusions in your review. Quantitative and qualititative count as empirical, by the way; I've seen people assuming they should stay away from qualitative work. It's fine to use as long as you don't make unwarranted generalizations, which is something you still have to do with quantitative work, anyway (i.e. don't draw conclusions unwarranted by the conditions of the experiment and prior work).

  How do you like to stay up-to-date on journal articles? Do you get any actual print editions (either passed around or through student subscriptions) or go to the library stacks specifically for the newest issues? Do you get RSS feeds or use any aggregators?

  I subscribe to the RSS feeds for the more popular journals in my field and that way I can read abstracts to see whether I actually want to go read the article. I usually access articles online through my institution's library since a lot of journals are online now.