Random tidbits and useful tools & advise on all things PhD I’ve collected over the years
On the PhD
On writing
- Composing the structure of a text: How to write a better minor thesis
- Writing beautifully: The writer’s diet
- Raul Pacheco-Vega’s blog with loads of resources for reading, planning and writing
On supervisors
- The chapters on supervision in both How to get a PhD & The Unwritten Rules of PhD Research, particularly the one in The Unwritten Rules of PhD Research is nice, with some entertaining descriptions of different types of supervisors
- I also really like this post from The Professor Is In
On supervision
- This informative post (and incidentally the only one of its kind I could find) on supervising MSc projects as a PhD student, which is common practice in the Netherlands
On working accross cultures
- Working across different cultures – although it is focused on the business world, I still found this book quite useful: The Culture Map
On transparent research reporting
- Questionable Research Practices in Ecology and Evolution, here
- Ten common statistical mistakes to watch out for, here
- Improving the transparency of statistical reporting in Conservation Letters, here
- Who did what: making a machine readable table of credit assignment, here and here
- On use of deceptive colour scales (rainbow is no good!), here, here but may load slowly, and the viridis colour scale
- This tweet about the meaning of words that indicate probability
On experimental design
On learning statistics
- This awesome & adorable course to teach you the basics (even if you know statistics this is still worth a visit).
- Common statistical tests are linear models (or: how to teach stats), here
- This beautiful visualisation & explanation on nested hierarchical modelling
- This powerpoint explanation of bayesian analysis in R
On version control
- This awesome interactive tutorial on git branching
On Rmarkdown
- My own blog series on writing a thesis with Rmarkdown
- Bookdown, and blogdown, which I use for this website
- Making a glossary, here
- Reversing from Word back to Rmarkdown, here
On spatial data analysis with R
On data visualisation
- This comprehensive guide on all things data visualisation: Fundamentals of Data Visualization
- 3D illustrations for scientific articles, here
On poster design
- This video on how research posters can be done better and a criqitue on that video from a blog dedicated to scientific poster design
Other
- Our world in data, in case you need to know how the world is doing outside of your research topic
- Smart Choices – A Practical Guide to Making Better Decisions, very helpful for thinking more clearly and explicitly in professional (ecological) and personal decision making
- Great, though quite US-centric, advice on building an academic career, The Professor Is In
- On using mathematical notation in ecology, here
- Extracting data from plots, here
- Wolfram Alpha, extremely powerful tool for calculating and looking up all kinds of things, I use it a lot to simplify mathematical formulas
- Sharing pretty pictures of your code, here