What happened to the literature review? In most doctoral programs in economics, business, or social sciences, students take several courses in research design and statistics.

However, the intricacies of preparing a literature review are rarely addressed during the PhD. At best, this topic is covered with a trip to the library and an overview of database searching.

I recently wrote a blog post about my business students and how they have lost the habit of reading that many of them had in elementary school. The blog even became an article in the Straits Times.

But I feel like I should give them a better sense of the books they could read.

As a Professor at Nanyang Technological University, I teach in one of the most research-intensive Universities in Asia. We have outstanding library facilities. Our library keeps more than a million print books on the shelves. Within our sprawling campus, we have seven libraries.

Singapore itself has some of the most amazing libraries I have seen. A law was even passed recently to allow users to borrow up to 32 books each time.

Email can be a great tool. It is hard to imagine, for example, academic collaborations without email. But email can also have harmful effects.

Constantly switching between emails and other tasks can cause you to lose focus. Answering emails quickly may give the impression that you are doing a good job, but emails…

I regularly organise writing groups where we meet and write together with other people.

Recently, the dean of research at my university asked me, “Why do you need to be with other people to write?” The idea of people coming together to do something as solitary…

The New Year is around the corner. And, like every year, the popular media is likely to push you to make resolutions in January. And then, by February, point out that many new year resolutions don’t actually stick…

In the previous blog post, we analysed the issue of paper rejections. We explained that paper rejections can be deeply unsettling, especially for junior academics. With this blog post, we seek to help other researchers deal with rejection.

For academics, being rejected forms a part and parcel of their work.

But although rejection is an incredibly common event for academics, it remains a taboo subject in academia…

When you enter a well-run restaurant, an army of chefs and sous-chefs, grillardins and sauciers have been preparing the ingredients for your delicious meal, many hours before you bite into that delicious appetizer.

A key difference between academics and chefs, though, is that while all chefs undergo rigorous training for their craft, most academics are never trained to write. While chefs practice mise en place — the key culinary technique we covered in our previous post — most PhD students are expected to learn how and what to write on their own! This lack of training is a paradox, especially considering the importance of writing skills to academic success…

So, you want to finish a piece of writing you have been working on. Or you are attending a writing bootcamp. Will you waste precious hours writing, deleting, writing and then eventually surfing the internet? Or will you create something of good and promising value?