Depends what your motivation is for getting it done. I hated my subject so just treated it like a job. Procrastination is completely normal, you just have to get on with *something* most days and it will get done. GOing over 4 years is very common, it just means you have to dedicate extra effort when you're working full time AND trying to finish it off.

I very much doubt its giving you migraines - have you had your eyes tested? Otherwise you're just stressing yourself out with it, so you need to consider relaxation techniques or getting out to the gym every day or something.

Thanks for the suggestions. I've downloaded goodreader which is great! Already had dropbox. I don't use mindmaps usually, so not sure about the mindmap one? I tend to right my plans out in bullet points instead.

I've found the dragon app useful though.

I went to a conference where they had a special panel of editors for journals (i.e. top top top american journals in my field). This question was asked and all 4 editors said its fine to do this, as its your work. But you can't plagiarise across journals articles i.e. if you write 2 articles based on the same 'problem' you have to make sure your intro/lit review is paraphrased and not exactly the same as your other article.

If its 1 or 2 sentences, then even if it does go through turn it in, you can 't really say whether it's plagarised or not, particularly if its referenced well. To be honest, I've read many a journal who cite someone and blatantly copy a sentence to explain something! (without quoting).

If it were me, I'd tell him/her to write it down formally on a bit of paper saying "I am aware that line 4, page 5 is word for word and therefore I will correct this and paraphrase appropriately" or something similar. Then take that piece of paper into the viva, but I wouldn't get it out unless they ask specifically about those areas of the thesis. At that point he/she can whip it out and sheepishly say "well yes, I'd spotted that mistake too and was going to correct it" but you don't want to point it out unless the examiners do IMO.

TBH I doubt the examiners will pick it up (depending on the size of the thesis). I had accidentally put the name of the organisation into my thesis THREE times - and they didn't have a clue where the research had been done and specifically asked me where in the viva!

yeah, I think the same about SEM, its a bit like data fishing really!

Having said that, it is great for path analysis and when you want to use latent variables in path analysis.

Can you not just run one model, run the other and then do the chi squared difference test?

You can do several ANOVAs, or MANOVA just make sure you justify it in either case. I'd personally be inclined to do a MANOVA with bootstrapping (because of the small sample)

erm, I've only ever compared groups on the same model. Have you got the Byrne book? I have it on pdf (care of Walminski) if you'd like a copy.


Have to say that I've now decided AMOS is just rubbish, and use mplus instead - SO much better and far better online support/info for it on semnet and the mplus forums.

I didn't have as submission date, I only had a viva date, so basically I was told that my viva was in 5 months, so you'd better submit in 2 :p

I think its usually about 3-6 months after, the sooner the better IMO!

I'd ask your supervisor for a copy or just go to see your IT people and say that you're still working on the PhD - they won't have a clue either way.

Otherwise walminkski is often useful in these matters or may know someone who is ;-)

So I just got given a free ipad :-) well I've got given hubby's old one as he got a brand new one for free. So....what are the best apps/ways of reading pdfs etc.

I'd love to be able to annotate pdfs really, but not through mendeley - I found their pdf reader great, but the program itself crashes my pc every time I've tried to use it in the last 2 years.

agree with LD - I'll cite if they have 1 sentence that says something vaguely similar to what I wanted. I might choose not to say "according to..." though, I might just say "a.1 is awesome (X, 2012)"

I would send her the work, but I'd make sure it was max 2 emails worth - i.e. I wouldn't repeatedly ask her questions over email. Chances are she's stuck her out of office on to get some work done, or to spend time with her family, but knowing you are submitting within that time, she *should* be checking your final version.

yeah, as long as you get more money than you pay out on the fair. Especially if its only a few days a week. I used to do a 1hr 40 min journey to get to my uni where I did my PhD and teaching alongside it, so its totally doable. I could never work on the train though - london ALWAYS gives me a migrain so I had to sleep on the way home, and I get dizzy working on the way there, so used to just read fiction books.

in my discipline, and for empirical work, I think it purely comes down to method. If you have a great longitudinal study with a massive sample for example, then no matter how badly you position it, it will probably get in with some revisions. If your methodology is bad to being with or has some flaws then you'll have problems. I'm trying to publish some of my PhD stuff that is cross sectional and have had issues because of that - but then I am trying for the top journals - it would get published reasonably easily in lower level journals.

my background was basically my 'statement of the problem' that I was investigating, which included national statistics, and a review of the general literature (about 2k words) this wasn't the lit review though, so it was more like a "what's been done on ice cream in general" then my lit review looked at a specific issue about eating ice cream and reviewed all the literature related to that.

I also provided a little section on how my PhD had evolved from the proposal and why - the examiners really liked that bit.