This study developed a serial mediation model grounded in social cognitive theory to examine how three types of supervisory support (academic, emotional, and autonomy) influence academic procrastination among doctoral students in China, emphasizing the sequential mediating roles of research self-efficacy and persistence intention. Utilizing data…

Purpose: This paper contends that data generated by research on supervision are often taken as authentic data. Through an examination of studies that use audio/visual recordings to investigate supervision, the paper both promotes and problematises the recording of supervision meetings as a useful technique for doctoral supervision research. This…

Whilst China has become home to the second largest doctoral education system in the world, with over 20% of its doctoral graduates taking up postdoctoral researcher positions inside and outside of China, a lack of information regarding the expectations of these doctoral graduates in pursuing postdocs has resulted in a failure to meet their…

Researchers have shown that the pursuit of doctoral studies is often related to the desire to become an academic, despite the constrained academic labour markets and changing (or deteriorating, as some have argued) academic working conditions (AWC) worldwide. In this study, we assessed the extent to which Chinese PhD students were aware of the…

This article explores how women's postgraduate education becomes entangled with heteronormative gender regimes enacted in public discourses that caution against women becoming "too" educated in China. The cultural capital of the PhD is obliterated by the loss of cultural capital resulting from gender non-conformity. Two powerful…

The exploration of factors influencing the output of doctoral research results is meaningful for higher education management. This study's purpose lay in investigating the influence of motivation and training environment on doctoral students' research outcomes in the Chinese province of Sichuan. The study aimed to explore whether environment…

Social support is a crucial factor in the academic engagement of doctoral students, which is vital to their overall success. While past studies have mostly focused on the support from doctoral supervisors, support from other significant groups, including institutions, peers and families, has been largely neglected, and even no study has…

Purpose: While higher education has been encouraging interdisciplinary research, few studies have been conducted to understand how interdisciplinarity shapes the identity construction of scholars, especially doctoral students who may already strive to socialize into academia. Design/methodology/approach: Therefore, this study adopts the approach…

This paper reports on a study that examined the process of two international doctoral students' academic socialisation in Chinese universities. Drawing on the concept of academic socialisation and social network analysis, we analysed multiple types of data, including study-abroad social network questionnaires, concentric circles interviews,…

Using 9277 records from the 2020 China Graduate Student Satisfaction Survey, we examined the relationship between STEM Ph.D. students' research training and their subsequent career interests. Based on the student involvement theory and social cognitive career theory, four dimensions of research training (quantitative involvement, qualitative…

This study explores the doctoral cultivation system and mechanism of university think tank in China. A policy narrative analysis of doctoral cultivation mechanism aims to unpack how to cultivate university think tank talents. It is suggested that we need to promote the construction of interdisciplinary disciplines and clarify the attribution of…

With rapid economic advancement and government commitment to the expansion of higher education, China has taken a leap forward from being a leading sender of international students to an attractive destination for international students. In many respects, the hurried expansion and internationalization of Chinese higher education itself are a…

This paper employs the notion of a "career script" as a conceptual basis to examine how age-based academic career norms are internalized, strategized, and reproduced among PhD students aspiring to become academics. It draws on interviews with 70 PhD students at leading universities in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macau that were…

Within high-participation systems of higher education such as China, the value of degrees is divided between credentials offering relatively high positional value and those offering less value. With that, institutional hierarchy plays a significant role in shaping graduate employability. This paper illustrates the contrasting experiences of two…

Publishing is a critical avenue for scholars and a significant challenge for Chinese doctoral students. This study employs online ethnography to examine discussions on academic publishing anomie in the 'Graduated Group', including interviews with 10 doctoral students to explore the dynamics of academic misconduct. Under the high-pressure…