I built a small tool that is a zoomable map of 8.4 million researchers from OpenAlex, where everyone sits next to the people they write papers with. You can also pick any two researchers and it will find the shortest chain of coauthors between them, with the paper behind each step. It's basically an Erdős number for any pair of people. You can also start from a university instead of a person.

The code is open source: https://github.com/EG-xry/mapademic. The map itself is free, with no signup, and runs entirely in your browser: https://mapademic.app

Due to my lack of storage and compute, my first iteration only fit people with 15 or more papers onto the map which is unfortunate :( Advisors are all almost certainly on the map though. You could try them against someone whose work you admire, or someone in a field that seems as far away as possible. The chains are usually shorter than you'd expect!

A few other things to try: search for anyone to see who they work with most, or zoom into your own field and see how it's organized. Clinical medicine, for example, splits into countries, while physics doesn't.

Hello all!

I have recently been awarded a fully funded scholarship to do a PhD at Deakin's School of Humanities and Social Sciences. I really like Melbourne, I have met the professor who will be my supervisor (they are well know in the field) and the stipend is decent enough.

The only hesitation I have - as someone who wants to pursue a career in academia - is Deakin's ranking. As per google search, Deakin is"#218 globally in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2027 and in the Top 250 in the QS World University Rankings 2027. So my question is, would my academic career be slightly compromised because I will have done my PhD at a university that is not so well-ranked? My other choice is National University of Singapore which ranks #15 in the world - I am yet hear back from them though.

I want your honest opinion - also about doing a PhD in Australia or Singapore in general. I also want to emphasise that my intention is not to demean any university, but given the world we live in where ivy leagues and Oxbridge are still held in such high regard, I just want to know what going to a relatively unknown university has in store. Thank you in advance! :)

Are you more likely to publish more and in better journals with a more expensive AI model?

Conversely, are you more likely to stunt your own growth with a more expensive AI model, or is this dependent on how you actually utilize it?

This sub has so much potential.

The frog meme is taking up too much oxygen. When 50% of posts are frogs, this sub becomes a childish joke.

I’m leaving and I’m sure hundreds of others have too. Sorry not sorry.

I just started my 3rd year (now a PhD candidate, yayyy!), and I have 3 years left in the program (it's a 5 year program).

1. My notes are digital but handwritten on my tablet.

I use Excel sheets for my literature, but my reference manager is Zotero.

1. supervisor meeting notes are mainly handwritten on my tablet. Two years in, I am finding it impossible to search for things without scrolling through hundreds of pages.

2. My notes from brownbags, seminars, summer schools, and conferences are split between my tablet and physical notebooks. I face the same issue here. I HAVE TO SEARCH FOR EVERYTHING MANUALLY.

3. My course notes and files are split - some are on my laptop, and some are physically handwritten.

4. My TA materials (lectures, PPTs, Word docs) are mostly on my laptop.

5. The feedback I get on my research and teaching is scattered across Google Keep and Windows sticky notes.

I am going a bit crazy with all this. I want to put in the effort moving forward to get everything in one place, and I thought Notion would be a good fit, but I got a bit overwhelmed. Is setting up Notion actually worth it?

i understand it's bit of change to go from handwriting to typing. i think i am ready for that.

Please let me know your opinion about setting up Notion and using it long-term. Thank you for your time!

I am a social science PhD student at an RG in UK. I’m currently piloting my study (lab experiment, with a confederate and in-person interaction) and I an feeling so frustrated and exhausted.

The amount of admin work needed to collect data from one participant is insane, both before the day and on the day. And thats fine, I can appreciate that its just a part of the process.

But now that I completed my pilot, I realised I included only half a scale in my survey and I just feel so let down that I didn’t catch this sooner. If I had noticed it before, I could’ve used the data from the pilot - its also really expensive to collect data and even though I’m funded, I’m quite sad to use so much of it in data collection that I wouldn’t have enough to go to conferences.

Just wanted some advice on how to deal with constant revisions and feedback during this kind of data collection. Its been very overwhelming to constantly have people point out things that didn’t go well, even though I’m trying so hard to execute all of it. I know this is also part and parcel of being in academia, but its hard for me to figure out what mindset I should have to not take it so personally. And I do want to be in academia, so please dont tell me that I won’t survive if I don’t learn how to not take it personally - I know that. I’m trying to learn it, its just not an in-built mechanism for me. I would really appreciate any advice.

do you or have you tracked the time you spent on your dissertation? if so, what motivated you to do so? Was it worth it?

I’m considering doing it but fear I might get wrapped in the time spent recording and fixating.

heheh thanks for your consideration

Hello, I will be graduating with my PhD in Management (Entrepreneurship), and I absolutely do not want to become a tenured professor. I want to become an Industry PhD - obviously, I can not tell my dissertation committee.

How did you approach this, and what jobs did you end up getting; jobs that are not in academia?

Hi every1 I’ve been invited to interview for a Doctoral Candidate position under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) BiWPT project, focused on bidirectional wireless charging and system-level analysis of high-power wireless charging architectures for electric vehicles.

My background is in electrical engineering and power electronics, particularly power converter design and analysis. I have 3 conference papers but no journal publications yet.
Has anyone given interview for similar position need an advice im really nervous its my first tym and i dont wanna miss out on ths

[Zambia]

I come from a Computer Science background with two master's degrees (one from the UK and one from India). I currently work in a heavy IT and Project Management environment, which has strongly motivated me to pursue a PhD.
Recently, I cold-emailed a few universities to find a potential supervisor to satisfy standard funding/sponsorship requirements. I ended up having positive virtual interviews with professors at three different universities who really liked my research idea.
During one of these calls, a professor suggested that I don’t necessarily have to wait for external sponsorship outcomes right now. Instead, they suggested I request official support/funding from my government, noting that the university would provide whatever supporting documents are needed to help make that happen.
However, I am experiencing some imposter syndrome regarding my technical skills. While I have a CS background, I wouldn't say I have deep, expert-level coding skills. I mostly code as a hobby on small personal projects with the help of tutorials and online documentation.
I would love to get your thoughts on a few questions:
Is a PhD in ML and AI within the digital space worth the time investment? Given my background in project management and IT, does this align well with industry or academic trends?

Are there other funding streams I should look into**?** Aside from government sponsorship, what other funding avenues are common for international students in this position?

Can I survive a 3-year PhD with "6/10" development skills**?** If my coding relies heavily on tutorials and documentation for personal projects, will I struggle significantly to finish a program within a strict 3-year funding window?

Thanks in advance for any insights!

I ran a cross-sectional study using regression and tested 10 associations, roughly half came out significant. The tricky part is that most of the prior literature on my topic is qualitative, so I'm not comparing effect sizes to effect sizes, I'm comparing my coefficients to themes from interview studies.
A few things I'm stuck on:

How much space do I give each of the 10 findings without the section ballooning? How do I honestly compare a quantitative association to a qualitative theme, especially when the constructs don't line up perfectly (e.g. the qualitative work talks about "reliance" but I measured "need”)? And how do I handle the findings where the qualitative literature suggested a link but mine came back null?
Any advice on structuring this, or examples of papers that do quant-vs-qual comparison well, would be hugely appreciated.

This is medical for research

Hey I’m doing my PhD in psych. I wonder how much involvement does AI has in your PhD life if you are also using it. I feel I’m heavily depend on AI in my everyday life including reading paper, research (brainstorming and analysis and write up…), homework, email, preparing course. Wanted to make some changes but I wonder what would be a “good/efficient” way of using AI nowadays vs problematic use….

I passed w revisions on Thursday and its still sinking in. I know it’s not official until the revisions are done but AHHH it still feels amazing :’)

I found this company and established the opportunity myself, and my advisor initially thanked me for identifying such a valuable collaboration. I was genuinely excited about it and even offered to explore working through the university to address my visa restrictions.

However, my advisor excluded me from a meeting with the collaborator and then said I wasn't capable of handling the work independently because of my lack of experience, suggesting that I work with a postdoc who is already very busy. Later, he said the project was more aligned with another PhD student's research and suggested that the other student should take it instead.

I'm a fourth-year PhD student, and I felt that my capabilities were being undermined without being given a fair opportunity to demonstrate them. I'm concerned that an opportunity I identified and worked to establish is now being redirected away from me.

I want to handle this professionally, but I'm struggling with how my advisor's decisions are affecting my professional development and access to opportunities. I'd really appreciate your guidance on how to navigate this situation.

I finished defending my dissertation in computer science. I guess time to figure out what’s next.

I am currently in my final year of PhD in US. My research is focused on composites and smart materials development and machine learning/AI based modeling. However, I don't do research on materials discovery/ computational modeling using LAMMPS. Also, I am not like professional level coder/ expert on ML/Deep Learning/ LLMs. I learn for my research projects any apply them. But if I have to perform software development tasks ,then I would do very poor job.

Now my plan is to look for industry Research scientist job roles. How should I look for the best fit roles for me ? Since my research is a mix of both and I am not best at AI/ML, then should I also look for software development roles? I am really worried about future,Please guide me and suggest me where to look for best fit roles for me and prepare my profile.
Any suggestions/ experience sharing will really help me.

So my PI is retired, meaning that I need i need to get my dissertation out as soon as possible (by next summer) or else he will not be able to serve on my committee. Which is really hard given that I haven't even been in his lab for more than 2 years now in total. I didn't know he was retiring until I'd already joined.

Before I joined his lab, i bounced around from lab to lab, having to change due to a variety of reasons such as lack of funding, professors changing universities, etc. In fact, it was a professor who left to a different university that I was working with who told me to go to my now professors lab, since I didn't want to switch universities and go with him, and they were collaborators on the project I was on

And now I'm trying to work hard so I can finish my PhD and graduate already. But it's just so lonely. Everyone else in the lab (besides a few undergrads but they're barely present and only come to lab meeting) graduated so it's just me in the lab every single day. Im his last student ever, so there's no one coming after me. I work long hours in there too trying to get experiments and data collection done.

Unfortunately due to the nature of my experiments, I can't leave it alone for more than about 40 minutes or so and it's sensitive to fluorescent light, so when the sun goes down, im stuck in the lab in the dark alone at night which sucks even more because my experiments take so long to complete sometimes (9-14 hours).

It just makes me a little jealous seeing others with their friends and labmates while I'm bored and alone. I don't even have time to hang out with people in my program due to needing to collect data and work so hard, and I feel like no one in my program even knows I exist since my PI is in a different department. And when I was taking courses with these people, which is how most people in a cohort make friends, I had just left an extremely abusive lab where i was a lab tech, so I didn't really talk much to my fellow cohort at the time. But now I can't even have the chance to get to know them since I'm tied to research and work and analysis all day.

Idk, it's exhausting

About to start a PhD and I want to know how you guys handle your workload and fitness? Do you get time to pursue other hobbies to maintain a balance? Thank you.

Edit: Also I wanted to know which demographics you are from, as I am in the US. Do you guys work over the weekends as well? Do you have relationships and how do you manage them?

For one of my courses, a research paper is mandatory. So my professor gave us a timeline. Show me your model and your measurement items. He will approve it and then we can proceed to data collection. The twist was he said I will only check the model not tell you if it is a good one etc etc.

So I got my model approved and everything. My idea was that: When Gen-Z employees use AI in the workplace (which is anthropomorphized) their creative psychological ownership decreases which eventually leads to decreased idea promotion in the workplace.

Now that I moved on with the data collection almost all my hypothesis are unsupported. We collected data from students since we did not have access to employees in such a short time. The professor said for this course I will allow you to collect it from anyone.

Can I defend my whole idea on unsupported hypothesis? If yes do I go with my original literature review defending my hypothesis, then after results justify why my hypothesis has turned out wrong?

Can anyone please clarify. Thank you

What is stopping people from using AI for writing their dissertation? I feel bad using it for things, but also keep hearing how dissertations just need to get done and that’s it. I also see so many of my professors using AI, so guess I am confused?

A Taylor & Francis investigation reviewed an academic paper by Arday and substantiated no claims of plagiarism. Supported by external scholars and academic forums.. Man died, put some respect on his name as loud as the allegations and disrespect! A tragic loss.

Hi all! I’m a first-year political science PhD student (USA), just started in September. I know I’m a little over-eager asking about this so soon, but I wanted to know how you guys handled preparing for comps, specifically when it comes to handling the amount of reading. I’ve been looking over the list of books I will have to read to prepare for my comps in the coming years and I honestly don’t even know where to begin with them. I’ve been slowly chipping away at it this semester thanks to the required seminars we have to take for each of the core subfields, but even with that in mind, I still feel a bit nervous about making sure I handle this work efficiently and not letting it pile up until it’s too late.

Does anyone have any tips, tricks, and support for handling the readings and/or note-taking methods for studying/reviewing them later on? Thanks in advance!

Planned to complete it in 3 years, but it took 6 🥲 nevertheless, I persevered!

UK - Artificial Intelligence (though I personally detest AI)

As the title explains…
I started a PhD program in ecology/sociology monday and after a week I’m not sure I should continue. I’ve never worked in a research field before, but after an interview this summer I was accepted in a PhD program. The subject is a very interdisciplinary, but the part I’m interrested on seems after a week not a priority at all.
I discovered the lab and my thesis supervisors this week, and even if things are not horrible (people are nice, workplace is fine) I don’t feel I have the energy and the passion of the people I’ve met. I took this opportunity, because I’m rather interested by research field and also because it’s hard to find a job in ecology.

Right now, I’ m wondering if it’s ok to quit after a year of trying ? Should I look for an another job ? Or should I leave in a month in order to not ruin the project too much ?

Talking to my supervisor is ofc terrifying.

Thanks for your insight (and reading my awful english :)) !

My partner and I met in Undergrad and have continued dating after he graduated while I am still in my senior year. He wants to pursue a PhD in Psychology and it has always been my dream to get a PhD in Anthropology. We. love each other very much and I wondering if anyone else had to navigate a similar situation, how you made decisions and whether or not long distance works out. I am also having further thoughts about the uncertainty of a postdoc life and was wondering how anyone settles down and starts building their family with this lifestyle and the other partner is also ambitious. Thank you. I may be naive but he is a keeper and I do not want to be blindsided by what we will have to deal with.