Getting a start on my professional doctorate

[TiramisuQueenoftheFaeries]

So I'm starting a professional doctorate (part-time) in a year's time. It's a few years since I completed my MSc and my intention is to take my research in a different direction from then. I'd quite like to do some work in advance, if I can, to refine my research question and start to scope out my lit review. Is this possible/a good idea, or a hiding to nothing? I have access to journals and academic resources through my work.

If it is a good idea, I'd love any resources people would care to suggest on getting started with a doctorate. Cheers :)

Hopeful bump for evening crowd

I don't know what discipline/topic you are studying, so it's a little hard to recommend resources beyond try the academic journals and other resources! One good thing to get sorted might be which database/storage you use for your references- there's been discussion on this board before. My preference is for Mendeley as it allows you to have an online (cloud) version and a desktop version which are sync'ed. It also allows you to have a download button which immediately puts any reference you read about in your online storage, so if you come across something in your reading/news/online, as long as you go to the abstract, you can input the citation that way. I use it a lot as I source a lot of new articles/info from alerts from journals (maybe set a few up for the key journals in your area) and also on Twitter- but I am in a very applied field and there are lots of reports/policy docs I need to know about so Twitter is not as mad as it sounds (I have an academic Twitter account that faces my policy interests). Others use and like Zotero. I've never met anyone who liked Endnote which is what is provided on standard Word packages.

Do you work at the/a uni? You could ask the supervisor you have for some support they may be able to get you some sort of associate access to read papers or library access. Is it book/classroom or lab based research

Woo, answers!

My discipline is an applied field of psychology, which I currently practice in, hence journal access through work. I guess I can take it as no harm to start doing Now exploration of the lit, then? Suppose I was just hoping there were some interesting or useful resources out there on how to refine your research question :)

www.amazon.co.uk/Developing-Research-Questions-Social-Scientists/dp/1403998159?tag=mumsnetforum-21

I would work closely with a supervisor to develop research questions, also it depends how much freedom you will have over what you then test/investigate- I mean sometimes your broad research questions (like your aims) come theoretically, sometimes they have to be worked out from the type of data/experiments/interview populations to which you have access.