If you have a PhD - what advice would you give someone who is about to start?

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I am very likely to start a PhD after Christmas. It won’t be easy as I have 3 School age children... but I have recently discovered a research area I am fascinated about and have the motivation. I work as a senior lecturer full-time in a post-1992 University, btw, so I guess it’s a conducive environment for this sort of things.

I know I can have the right stamina as I have already written two books about my subject, but that was before the children came along... I feel very daunted now! I know too many people with mental health issues directly related to their PhDs and want to avoid that.

What advice would you give someone in my position?

Hi all and thank you for your very helpful posts. I guess I simply don't know enough about PhDs by publication. I always thought you'd need a very large, solid portfolio of pee-reviews articles, book chapters and possibly also an academic book at least to qualify. I haven't got that kind of research behind me, but I guess I could go in that direction from now on.

Has any of you got a PhD by publication and if so, could you please share your experience?

I have looked into PhD by publication and came to the conclusion that it would be quite difficult to achieve unless you are already an established researcher.

To my recollection, you need to have at least 3-5 peer reviewed articles. You also need to register with a university that offers PhD by publication - some restrict this to staff members. In most cases, you then also need to write a framing statement (5-10,000 words) that pulls your work together and defines your contribution to knowledge. There are a couple of articles out there about this, one on THES.

I have published some practitioner work and have an academic chapter to my name so I looked into it, but realised that to write further articles I would need academic collaborators or a supervisor at the very least. I approached my old university, but was told that no one really had the time to supervise non-students - which is fair enough!