At a seminar I went to on getting papers published, the presenter suggested emailing the editor with a brief summary as reasonable and sensible, particularly so if the article you propose is slightly outside the normal scope of the journal but I think he deemed it an acceptable thing to do in general.

Ah, I think I understand now - I was taking the heading to be just an indication of the subject area of the questions and hadn't made the direct link to relevance to the assessment of the morality of someone. Looking back at it, I think I was possibly just being dim, sorry.

I've completed your survey as far as I can and I'm not trying to be wilfully awkward, honest, but I couldn't answer the set of questions asking about relevance because you didn't say in what context relevance was being judged.

Don't think you should necessarily abandon hope. If it was an advertised post (rather than a meeting with just you in response to a speculative letter) the Uni HR will have set in stone that every candidate must be asked the same questions to avoid accusations of unfairness and they wouldn't have bothered interviewing you if they didn't think that you were a plausible candidate, probably they will have had many applications.

I agree. I do realise that across the university there are many people handing in theses and the staff of the registry can't throw a party every time but when I handed in my upgrade report and hard copy I got a smile and a 'well done' amongst all the checking and form filling which was a kind acknowledgement of work done whereas when I handed in the softbound copy, which was the biggest hurdle in my mind, I might as well have been notifying them of a change of address and it felt very anticlimactic.

It also felt rather anticlimactic that although I was told informally that I had passed, the only official confirmation I got from the university in the following two months was a letter demanding the return of any outstanding library books.

And congratulations BTW.

Using mean as an average for Likert scales is dodgy because a mean assumes continuous data where the decimal fractions you have got would be meaningful whereas they obviously aren't in your case because there is no meaningful inter-category value. I think this link explains it better than I can http://achilleaskostoulas.com/2013/02/13/on-likert-scales-ordinal-data-and-mean-values/. Solution basically is to use median or mode to find the average for Likert scale data. Median is definitely available in SPSS, I assume mode is as well.

I find this attitude quite irritating. It isn't reasonable to claim that its snooty just to state the job you're currently doing. I haven't come across PhD students who are snooty about it, it wouldn't accord with the perennial state of 'its all going wrong and am I going to fail?'. Being a doctoral student is not something to be ashamed of or that there should be a need to cover up yet negative reactions occur often enough that dodging the issue and just saying 'student' or some equivalent seems the safest response.

Although it may vary by subject area, 32 pages if you only started in Feb doesn't sound bad to me, particularly when colleagues are in the same position as you.

Wanted to offer a suggestion about the information overload and multiple documents open at once which was a problem that afflicted me and left me always feeling stressed. I saved references that I hadn't yet used more informally than Mendeley either just as the pdf itself or as url in a Word doc with one line underneath saying what was potentially useful about this paper so that I knew the info was available to me and not lost. Then was strict about having only one paper consistently open at a time and opening and closing others only when I needed to make cross reference to them. Also, made sure that I shut down the computer at the end of the day with all tabs/papers closed and recorded rather than sleep mode otherwise it played on my mind that the job was half done.

Have sent you a PM.

Its depressing I agree but rejection isn't necessarily a reflection of the quality of the abstract you put in. The conference organisers have to put together coherent themes for all the conference sessions and it may just be that the paper you proposed was fine but didn't fit into any of the chosen themes. You shouldn't feel like a failure on this account.

On a more practical level, did your supervisor read the abstract and offer any feedback and once the conference programme is published can you see what the structure of the selected abstracts is to see if yours can be changed stylewise for future submissions?

Got them both, thank you.

Thanks for the response Memo - links as follows:
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10816-012-9132-9
and http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10816-012-9135-6

Please can I ask if anyone could send me a copy of two papers from the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory. Both vol. 20, issue 4, Atici and Whitcher Kansa pp.663-681 and Palacio-Perez pp.682-714.

Thanks for any help.

I haven't written an article on an unrelated topic but did give a paper at a conference on a subject that related to my (PhD-unrelated) MA dissertation during my final year. The conference theme was so relevant to my dissertation that it seemed too good an opportunity to miss and I could draw the paper together quite quickly with only a little extra work to bring it up to date. I would be more hesitant about starting research for a paper unrelated to my PhD from scratch because of the time commitment. I think if you did you would have to be very strict with yourself about how much time you could afford to spend on it.

One other thing to think about if the topic is entirely unrelated to your PhD is whether you should or would want to call yourself an independent scholar rather than being affiliated to the university in which you are doing your PhD. I'm not sure if it matters but I did feel slightly odd at the conference being listed as being of the University of X when the work was done at the University of Y.

Morning,
Sadly today's goal remains the same as yesterday's. Hope others made better progress yesterday.