Map: Trends

How your project has moved over time: accumulation, reading against writing, and questions.

Trends gives you self-knowledge rather than a scoreboard, through three readings of how the project has moved: how sources accumulated, how your reading balanced against your writing, and when your questions were framed and worked on. There are no streaks, no scores and no comparison against anyone else, because those measure compliance and nobody finishes a doctorate through consistency of daily activity. Every chart comes with a written reading, since a chart on its own is something you project your mood onto.

01 - Source accumulation

Sources arriving per week.

Most projects show bursts instead of a steady line, which is normal since literature searching happens in fits, though what to watch for is a long flat stretch followed by nothing, which usually means the search stalled instead of finishing.

The other shape to notice is a late spike, because sources arriving in bulk near a deadline generally means a review being assembled rather than a literature being read, and it is worth being honest with yourself about which one you are looking at.

02 - Reading vs. writing

Notes written per week against sources added, plus how much of your library you have actually written about.

This reading changes behaviour, because the common failure in a long project is not reading too little but reading a great deal and writing almost nothing, until two years of work exists as a folder of PDFs and a memory that is quietly degrading.

Watch coverage, since two hundred sources and forty notes means you have not processed most of what you collected and more searching will not fix it. The opposite pattern, heavy writing on a thin corpus, turns up less often and usually just before a supervisor asks whether you have read enough.

03 - Question activity

When your research questions were framed, and how much work has gone into them since.

A question framed early and never touched again is either settled or abandoned and you should know which, while a cluster of questions framed recently usually marks a change of direction, and being able to date that change helps when you write the “how this project developed” section.

What this is for

Two honest uses, the first being a supervision meeting, where “here is how the reading accumulated and here is where the writing lagged” makes a better conversation than “it’s going fine” and the charts do the remembering for you.

The second matters more. A long research project feels static from the inside for months at a stretch, and that feeling is usually false while also being one of the main reasons people leave, so a curve showing a hundred sources and sixty notes over eighteen months is not encouragement but evidence, which works better.

What it will not do

No streaks, no daily targets, no comparison against other users or a notional average, and no score.

Those mechanics produce activity, and activity was never the constraint on a dissertation, since thinking is, which is why a tool that rewarded you for adding a source every day would do active harm to the work.

Next: Venues.