When doctoral applications turn reviewers into detectives

Professor Chrissi Nerantzi and Dr Peter Hart share their view that doctoral applications should demonstrate authentic curiosity, critical engagement and academic integrity

There is something revealing about reviewing a doctoral application and finding oneself less engaged with the applicant’s intellectual curiosity than with the task of verification.  When a proposal cites specific papers that do not exist or the applicant misattributes ideas in ways that unravel on closer inspection, the reviewer’s role shifts. Instead of asking “What excites this researcher?” or “What questions are they asking?”, the reviewer finds themselves moving from curiosity to suspicion, asking very different questions: “Did they read this?”, “Does this publication exist?”, “Did they actually do this work at all?”

The doctoral journey doesn’t start when you register. Most graduating Doctors trace their journey back to the initial formulation of their research questions – the MA dissertations or frustrations in their work that led them to which ‘someone would research how we can do that better’. That leads to putting ideas on paper – and imagining how you might go about answering these questions. The research proposal that is written for an application on to a doctoral programme isn’t just an entry requirement, it is an integral part of the whole journey.

Therefore, when we say that doctoral study is about developing the capacity as a researcher to ask meaningful questions, we include the application process. We want to see that applicants can sit with uncertainty, to return to ideas repeatedly and critically, and to do so over an extended period and with sustained intellectual effort. A research proposal by all means, is not expected to be perfect. But it is expected to indicate if the applicant has the capacity to do the proposed work at doctoral level, if the work itself is worthwhile doing and how the applicant’s heart and soul is connected to this work. The proposal needs to be honest and reflect who the applicant is, what excites them and what they want to do and why, and why these matters to them.

Sometimes applicants seem to believe a piece of work should be ‘polished’, close to perfection. Of course there are standard’s we want to uphold, but raw intellectual curiosity is more important than perfect grammar.

When applicants mention work that cannot be found, because it simply doesn’t exist, this is an indication that they have not engaged with the literature and emerging research in any meaningful way. There are questions that go far beyond referencing accuracy. What do such shortcut practices reveal? Why in such a hurry? How should we react to such signs? And there’s no substitute for time – before being offered a place on a doctorate, applicants are invited to interview, and it will soon be made clear if someone has read and digested the work in the field that they want to contribute too.

Doctoral research demands criticality, precision, stamina. It demands the willingness to read slowly, to read a lot, and yes, to be confused, uncomfortable, even lost at times. Not (yet) understanding is also part of the process and feeling stuck too. To revise one’s thinking, and to stay with difficult material after the initial excitement has evaporated. To be committed to respectful and honest academic inquiry. To digest! To discover and uncover! And recover from the lows, the confusion, the messiness. Fast and superficial writing, rather than slow and critical writing, makes it difficult to trust the work.

And trust matters. Supervisors invest time, care, and intellectual energy, often navigating uncertainty alongside their students. This relationship is built on good faith: that the student is genuinely engaging with ideas, is willing to acknowledge what they do not yet know and is developing their work through careful and critical scholarly practice with integrity and honesty. When that trust is undermined at the point of application, reviewers question whether the conditions for a fruitful doctoral journey and output(s) are present.

Reviewing doctoral applications is one of the few moments where researchers encounter scholarship in its most hopeful form as the applicant has a unique opportunity to demonstrate a strong commitment for change and transformation to create a better world, to make a difference through their anticipated contribution. Genuine proposals shine with intellectual curiosity. They reveal what an applicant is wondering about, what troubles or intrigues them, where they sense gaps, tensions and possibility, and what they cannot yet fully articulate but wish to explore.

When research proposals are sprinkled with fabricated references, that sense of intellectual excitement is not there. The proposal has no heart and soul.

Of course, there’s those people who are not using AI to ‘cheat’ but end up being caught in the crossfire because of the ‘telltale’ signs of AI use in their proposal. Those that over-rely on AI to check grammar and ‘improve’ the style, or who are using AI to support referencing. Part of the doctoral journey is in developing your own academic voice, and in developing meticulous attention to detail. Although there are good, positive, helpful uses of AI in your doctoral journey, it’s unlikely that it will have much to contribute to your research proposal.

At a time when tools exist that can rapidly generate academically styled text, this issue becomes acute. The problem is not the use of tools, but the displacement of scholarly responsibility. Doctoral work requires a scholar to take responsibility for their reading, their claims, their thinking and their developing position. Outsourcing that responsibility, outsourcing their thinking and criticality at the very point where one is asking to be admitted into a research community is a deeply troubling move.

If we want doctoral education to remain a space for deep, critical, creative and meaningful inquiry, we must be clear about what we value as a community of researchers.

Written by Professor Chrissi Nerantzi, Director of the Imaginative Curriculum Centre for Research and Scholarship, School of Education, University of Leeds, United Kingdom and Dr Peter Hart, Director of Postgraduate Research Studies, School of Education, University of Leeds, United Kingdom