Useful links

For Students

Blogs, papers and guides

A Happy PhD A highly recommended blog about doctoral productivity, supervision and wellbeing kept by my friend and colleague Dr. Luis Pablo Prieto

Patter Patt Thompson’s blog about academic writing for PhDs and researchers in general. She provides very interesting guidance in terms of signposting for journal and thesis writing, how to structure the conclusion chapterthesis writing modes, and many other useful topics.

“So long, and thanks for the Ph.D.!”. A.k.a “Everything I wanted to know about C.S. graduate school at the beginning but didn’t learn until later”, by Ronald T. Azuma, updated in 2019

Illustrated Guide to the PhD by Matt Might

How to be Stupid in Research (open access paper)

Good enough practices in scientific computing (open access paper)

PhD Comics

Resources for academic writing

Ten simple rules for structuring papers (open access paper)

Useful Phrases and Sentences for Academic & Research Paper Writing. (really useful when writing a paper)

Reporting statistical results in your paper (really useful when writing a paper)

Academic Resources

Statistical methods for HCI

How to Write a Literature Review: Actionable Tips & Links

Research Questions in Design-Based Research, by Arthur Bakker

On excellence in reviews and meta-reviews, by Ken Hinckley from a HCI perspective

Guide to a successful presentation (recommended in CHI’18)

Journal Index search tool

Text2Bib (a very useful tool to convert flat text references into .bib tex)

Recommended books (that may change your life…or part of it)

The gift of imperfection. Actually, the full title is: The Gifts of imperfection: Let go of who you think you’re supposed to be and embrace who you are; Your guide to a wholehearted life. This book communicates a very important message to our lives, which is particularly important to become an academic or professional with a balanced life. The author, Brene Brown, uses evidence from her research and her own life stories as a way of modelling the importance of sharing and embracing our weaknesses or “imperfections”.

Storytelling with data. Through this book, you can learn both the fundamentals of data visualisation and how to communicate effectively with data. The practical lessons that can be learnt from this book are critical for creating presentations, reports or dat-intensive-interfaces that explain the data rather than inviting people to put their “analysts hats” and explore the whole dataset.

Useful tools

Trello: Using Trello for Organising the PhD Life

PHD TOOLKIT: templates for meeting notes and planners

Google Keep: Shareable to do lists

Zotero: Reference Management System

EndNote: Reference Management System (via UTS)

International Societies

Society for Learning Analytics Research (SoLAR)

International Educational Data Mining Society (IEDMS) 

Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI)

International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS)