Critical Reflections on Doctoral Research and Supervision in Human Geography: The ‘PhD by Publication’

Doctoral education is central to both the production of knowledge and the reproduction of disciplines—producing the next generation of researchers. This paper considers the doctoral and supervisory experiences associated with the ‘the PhD by publication’—in which a dissertation comprises a number of stand-alone ‘publishable’ papers, along with introductory and concluding overviews. Using the entry points of human geography and our experiences doing and supervising these PhDs, we provide a number of guidelines for human geographers, and illuminate the identity work involved in this specific process of producing scholars.