It's not my field, but I suspect what you describe might be a little too specific. At least, I don't know if you'd find Masters/PGcert/PGdip level qualifications on that topic. I wonder whether organisations like the National Trust might offer short courses in along those lines though.

An alternative to consider would be a PG course in science communication more broadly. This would cover topics beyond conservation, and non-education settings, but it might be more career enhancing in terms of giving you more options.

The other thing I would suggest is identify people in the kind of roles you would want to move towards and ask them whether they've done any relevant courses. Or indeed whether such qualifications really would enhance your career prospects, or whether it's experience that counts.

My uni has imposed the 4 year submission limit rule. While I do think there are benefits to the student I think another factor at play is that PhD completion rates within a specified timeframe are yet another metric unis are now measured on. So I don't think it's all for our benefit. In my experience the limit can be enforced in a way that isn't flexible to students pursing additional training that might be of benefit to them. I'm not sure how it would affect people on 1+3 schemes either where the first year does sort of contribute, but not fully, to 'PhD time'.

lemonjuice, it depends on the field. In sciences it's very rare for papers to have a single author and pretty much unheard of for a PhD student to be a single author, even if they've effectively done most/all of the work

Not come across this before but I'd guess that they just want someone with knowledge of the funding sources available, what the annual funding cycle is, how competitive these grants are, where you can find other small grants/change down the back of the sofa etc.

'Track record of obtaining funding' is a more typical way of probing this. But I guess if you hadn't had the opportunity to apply for funding before, at least being aware of the sources is important.

sam29 raises a good point. Committing to a PhD without funding is a tremendous gamble, especially given the dreadful state of the academic job market. If you cannot secure some kind of funding, you may wish to consider doing it part time, while working, though I acknowledge there may be visa constraints on what kind of part time work you could undertake.

It's frustrating, but if you're using different methods in a different population, that should be sufficient difference to qualify as original research. It's difficult to know without more details about your field/topic as to how this overlap would impact upon the potential impact of your work, but it's unlikely to invalidate it as a PhD topic.

Have a chat with your supervisor about it. The truth is there are very few completely novel research topics as most things build in some way on existing work. If you only found this other work hidden away in a book then the chances are that it has had limited real world impact as few will have read it, so there is the opportunity for you to translate the concepts to a wider audience.

Keep going! :)

It may be that a PhD is a university requirement to be appointed on a particular grade. However if you had all the competencies for the job, but no PhD, they may be able to appoint you on a lower grade and then promote you when your PhD is awarded.

Contact the PI directly, explaining how you meet the other requirements, and see whether the above is what's going on here.

Google Scholar defines the h index as "the largest number h such that h publications have at least h citations." This means that the h index will always be smaller than the total number of papers published by that person.

In your first example the h index is 8 because there are 8 papers which have AT LEAST 8 citations.

In your second example there are 3 papers that have AT LEAST 3 citations.

My H index is 3 cos I have a total of 4 papers which have been cited 0, 3, 15 and 30+ times respectively. So there are 3 papers that have been cited at least 3 times.

If you had to have an exact number of papers with exactly the same number of citations the number would fluctuate up and down too much as citations increased, whereas it should actually increase over time for an individual, assuming their citations were increasing.

Hope that clarifies things. Like I said, I really don't think it's worth getting too bothered by. I for one wouldn't know how to compare those two candidates on the basis of the h index. I'd want to read their papers and know what their personal contribution was.

I know nothing about Law, but two providers of online programmes you might like to check based in the UK are the Open University (http://www.open.ac.uk/) and The University of London Distance learning programme (http://www.londoninternational.ac.uk/). They may have something suitable.

Hi charliebrown. Do you know what you want to do after your PhD is finished? Would you like to carry on in academia?

@tt_dan In your first example, you're right, the H index is 5, but in the second example the h index is 2, because there are more than 2 papers that have been cited at least twice. If paper 1 and paper 2 got an extra citation each the H index would go up to 3.

@Tonypane - the way to assess the quality of a specific paper is.... read it. That's pretty much all you can do. In some fields there are guidelines as to what a 'good' paper on a particular study design should contain e.g. how to write up a clinical trial. But at the end of the day the only way to tell if a paper is of good quality is to read it and apply the knowledge and critical reasoning you have developed through your own studies.

If you're looking for H-indices of particular researchers, these can be found on people's Google Scholar profile pages if they have one. It might also be available via ResearcherID.com.

In general... don't forget that a paper can be cited for the wrong reasons (lots of people critiquing it for example). And there may be excellent papers that get a cited a couple of times but have a big real world impact on say, policy. So these are very approximate measures, and I think we shouldn't invest too much energy into them.

The 'impact factor' is a measure which is applied to journals. It reflects the average number of times that papers in that journal have been cited in a specified period (last two years?). For example, Journal X has an impact factor of 2.54, meaning that on average each of the papers published in it have been cited an average of 2.54 times in the last two years. Which of course means that some may have been cited a lot and some not at all. It tells you nothing about the quality or citation rate of an individual papers within that journal.

The 'H index' is a measure which is applied to individual researchers. It is a slightly odd concept - it tells you the number, n, of that person's publications which have been cited at least n times. For example, I have my name on 4 publications of which one has never been cited, and three have been cited at least 3 times, so my H index is 3.

Both of them have their weaknesses, are subject to gaming and misinterpretation. For example, you can get rubbish papers in high impact journals, or vice versa. Equally, if you had someone who had published 10 papers, 8 of which had never been cited, but the other two papers had been cited 500+ times, they would still only have a H index of 2. So, in my opinion, they're kind of over-rated, but we're stuck with them.

Depends on your type of analysis, what question you're trying to answer, and how important that variable is.

I don't know, but you might want to try asking on Twitter, using the #AcWri hashtag. Worth checking that out anyway for discussions about academic writing.