A Notebook Section

Useful Reads

Books, articles, webinars, and writing worth your time. Some originals, some recommendations from elsewhere.

Useful Reads Academic Writing

The Multi-Loop Writing System: Structuring a Research Paper as Cycles, Not a Straight Line

Writing a research paper is not a straight line from introduction to submission. It is a system of loops: five core loops for thinking, literature, methodology, data, and analysis, wrapped by two cross-cutting loops for quality control and feedback. A framework for managing thinking cycles instead of forcing progress, and for understanding why strong papers are always built in cycles.

July 5, 2026

Useful Reads Research Methods

Using AI in Qualitative Analysis: Where It Helps, and Where the Researcher Still Has to Drive

Generative AI is already a capable assistant in qualitative analysis, from open and axial coding to working with images and video. The conditions for using it well are clear: keep a human driving the process, proof-check the output, and disclose in the methods section exactly how and how much AI was used. A practical look at the emerging norms, with five open-access papers to read.

July 5, 2026

Useful Reads Academic Culture

The Quiet Clustering: Shared Origins and the Narrowing Door in Hong Kong's Doctoral Pipeline

A large share of doctoral supervisors in Hong Kong come from mainland China, and so do a large share of their students. The public data shows a real clustering pattern in who supervises whom, it has a name in the research literature, and it narrows the door for doctoral applicants from other countries. What the numbers say, why it happens, and how to read the odds accurately.

July 2, 2026

Useful Reads Publishing

Disclosed, Not Banned: The Shape of Publishers’ Emerging GenAI Policies

Three years ago a manuscript portal asked the usual questions. Today it asks one more: did you use a generative AI tool, and what for? A reading of Elsevier’s September 2025 policy — one of the clearest expressions of the line major publishers have now settled on — and what it reveals about how the industry has decided to handle a technology that should have taken a decade to address.

June 21, 2026

Useful Reads Industry

An Alliance for an Underdefined Industry: AIHA and the AI-in-Hospitality Moment

AI in hospitality is under-defined, fragmented, full of noise, and lacking structure. The AI Hospitality Alliance is one of the first explicit attempts to fill that gap, anchored by SDSU’s Payne School and a growing academic network. A reading of what it is trying to do, why its three-pillar structure matters, and what its existence reveals about a field organising itself in a moment of technological transition.

June 21, 2026

Useful Reads Mentorship

The Supervisor Fit Problem: Why Most PhD Students Optimise for the Wrong Signals

The PhD student choosing a supervisor faces one of the most asymmetric decisions in academic life — years of working hours, references, and habits, decided on perhaps two conversations and a glance at recent papers. Most prospective students optimise for whatever is legible from outside the lab. Almost none of those signals predicts what the next four years actually feel like. A practical look at what the CV cannot show, and the four readings you can take before you commit.

June 7, 2026

Useful Reads References

The Sealed Envelope: How Reference Letters Get Read, and How Strong Ones Get Built Years Before You Ask

The most important documents in an academic application are the ones the applicant never gets to read. A polished CV and personal statement sit next to three sealed letters whose contents the student can only guess at — and most letters fail not by being negative but by being lukewarm, which is invisible from the outside. What readers actually look for, why the polite letter is the quiet killer, and how strong letters get accumulated years before they are asked for.

June 7, 2026

Useful Reads Academic Writing

The Reader Problem: A Working Guide to Academic Writing in Ten Tips

Most PhD students learn how academic writing sounds, but not how it works. A working guide to the ten craft moves that determine whether a draft gets read carefully or skimmed once — organised into three pillars (architecture, voice, and process) and built around a single principle: academic writing is, at heart, a transmission problem, and every craft choice is a small concession to a reader who is tired, busy, and not yet persuaded.

June 3, 2026

Useful Reads Presentations

Three Minutes, One Idea: Why Most 3MT Preparation Solves the Wrong Problem

The Three Minute Thesis sounds like an exercise in editing — take your full thesis, cut it down to three minutes, and present. Most students prepare on exactly that assumption, and most of them go out in the first round. A structural look at what the competition is actually measuring, why “compression” is the wrong instinct, and the recurring five-beat shape of the presentations that survive.

May 26, 2026