Many advisors don't push their students to do this, and they should. Or they haven't had enough practice to know to do this. Or they're not taking their responsibility seriously enough.

An effective PhD advisor/thesis isn't wandering the woods to find something. It's a guided coaching exercise, with an outcome in mind. If your advisor doesn't know this, maybe time to find a new advisor...

> An effective PhD advisor/thesis isn't wandering the woods to find something. It's a guided coaching exercise, with an outcome in mind. If your advisor doesn't know this, maybe time to find a new advisor...

You don't know me, but I really needed to hear this. I left grad school essentially because of a dearth of coaching. Thank you for framing this so succinctly.

This reminds me of Simon Peyton-Jones's (of Haskell fame) seminars on How to Write a Great Research Paper: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/academic-program/wr...

There are multiple slightly different versions of the seminar (another is linked below that one), but unfortunately they all came out after I'd finished my PhD, and I didn't hear that advice from anyone else.

The process I arrived at after losing time on failed projects was basically "fail fast": find the simplest quickest way to demonstrate that your idea won't work, and do that. Then find the next simplest, and so on, until either it works or you've proven it doesn't and moved on.

Introduction, related works, methods, OK, but writing the conclusion before doing experiments sounds like an integrity issue (assuming you re-write the conclusion after the experiments -- else I'd label it fraud). What is the idea behind it?

As someone who was encouraged to do something similar, it was akin to creating a template manuscript for the project at hand: sketch out the experiments you plan to do, the likely results, and illustrative figures. This is meant as an exercise very early on in the project discussion phase, before any experiments have been performed, and while you're still figuring out the papers to read.

No. Obviously you rewrite the whole paper. Academics rewrite their papers multiple times before submitting them. The whole thing is a draft of a draft. The idea is to make your ideas very very concrete by writing them down as a paper.

Really annoys me when the word fraud is thrown around so freely, so I'd appreciate it if you don't.

Thanks for the explanation.

> Obviously you rewrite the whole paper

It is not mentioned and was not obvious to me. Still, I'd postpone writing the conclusion to after you actually have the data. To do otherwise would be steering the experiments to get the expected results. I also reckon this depends on your field, how long the experiments take and your confidence in the results.

> Really annoys me when the word fraud is thrown around so freely, so I'd appreciate it if you don't.

I agree, 'academic dishonesty' is a more appropriate term here.

You typically have a finite set of overall results you expect to get, usually something like positive or negative. It helps to write out what you would conclude when you get either results. Think of this like a process that helps make your ideas clearer. And makes writing your final paper a lot easier.

This is amazing advice I hadn’t heard before, it rings very true.

I remember after my first paper was finished and submitted, and wow, it seemed easy to bang out papers after that, all you needed was four to five figures :)

My Doctoral Advisor had similar advice, though he suggested to add in aspirational figures as well. It can be helpful to help guide your initial readings and your experiments.