PhinishEdD Team Blog – What’s on our minds…

Circumnavigating Burnout: Balance is Critical

Burnout is an ongoing concern among those pursuing advanced degrees (Devos et al., 2017). Lee and Ashford (1990) noted its significance as a “syndrome of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization of others, and a feeling of reduced personal accomplishment” (p. 743). Burnout connotes a state of emotional, mental, and physical exhaustion caused by prolonged stress, overwork, and a lack of balance in life. Burnout can seriously affect one’s well-being, relationships, and productivity if left unchecked. Ultimately, burnout can derail even the most organized students from achieving their goals.

Burnout can affect any student, whether full-time or part-time, working and going to school, raising children, caring for aging parents, returning to school later in life, and so forth. Anyone can fall victim to burnout if they don’t prioritize self-care and work-life balance. The consequences of burnout can be severe, including:

Decreased performance and productivity in school and work tasks
Strained relationships and social withdrawal
Increased risk of depression, anxiety, and chronic illness
Decreased satisfaction and engagement across endeavors

It is crucial to recognize and address burnout at its early stages. Burnout can drain your mental and physical energy, perpetuating and reinforcing the feeling of malaise. So, how can you break this cycle and safeguard your overall well-being?

Gaps in the Literature

Early in my doctoral program, faculty members stressed the importance of “finding a gap” in the literature. A gap exposes an opportunity to design and publish a meaningful study. Publications are conversations. Each book, article, and conference proceeding adds breadth and depth to an ongoing discussion, sometimes spanning millennia. I listened to a long-running conversation through reading, following the twists and turns leading to my field’s current understandings and questions. If I wanted to join the discussion, I had to reflect on what was missing and what would allow me to add a novel idea.

As I looked for a gap, I was lost. I wasn’t an expert but a student learning from experts. How would I recognize missing information? In some cases, authors suggest future directions, but those might not be relevant to my interests or fit within my study’s constraints. I needed a way to find gaps.

I found a compass by enumerating gaps one might find in research. Once I had a list, it helped me brainstorm how these gaps might manifest in my field and refine literature searches to verify or refute that such a gap existed. This approach led me to the focus of my dissertation, building upon the existing conversation and adding new insights.

Below, I describe six gaps I considered, briefly explaining each. If you are working to identify or refine your dissertation topic or generate an idea for a new research project, considering the existing knowledge in your field from these perspectives might help.

Automated Citation Management: A Valuable Research Tool

I wish I could recover the hours I lost early in my doctoral journey managing sources and citations. I spent hours organizing PDFs into subfolders by topic, fixing and re-fixing formatting errors in bibliographies, reordering bibliographies, and responding to editor feedback because I failed to add or remove a source when adding or deleting a paragraph. I deluded myself further, thinking I’d catch situations where I had deleted my last reference to a source or needed to modify the year in a citation if I used two or more sources from the same author and year. In my early writing days, I fooled myself, “I’m only using this source for this assignment” or “I’ll remember to remove the entry from the bibliography if I delete this paragraph.” Manual citation management distracted me from reading, writing, synthesizing, and collecting data. Citation management is a solved issue; there is no reason to interact with any citation or bibliographic entry more than once.

After my third semester at Baylor, I started using Zotero, a computer program that manages sources and citations. I learned how to use it inside and out. Now, if an editor wants a citation format fixed, I fix it in Zotero, and it will be correct every time I use it. When I search for articles and find one I want to keep, I use the Zotero browser plug-in to load it into Zotero’s database and attach the article. I create folders and subfolders in Zotero to organize articles, but it is easier to use its built-in search capability to find what I need. When I insert a citation in a paper, I use the integration with Microsoft Word or LibreOffice Writer to manage the citation and automatically create the bibliography. With one click, I can even change the paper’s citation form (APA, MLA…).