Participant profile

Doctoral candidates (PhDers) of the EHU, from any PhD programme in any discipline, full-time or part-time, and in any year of PhDing.

Calendar

November/December 2026 in all three EHU Campus sites.

Duration / Timetable

13 hours (four three-and-a-quarter hour classes, one class per week over four weeks).

Time: 10:00 to 13:15

Attendance Requirement

To successfully complete the course PhDers will be required to attend all of all four classes, and contribute to all three set practical work submissions and final class group (see points 3 and 5 of the Basic regulations for participation in transversal training activities organised by the Doctoral School).

ALL ABSENCES must be justified with supporting documentation.

Language

English

Modality

A real-classroom

Pre-requisites

All classes will be conducted in English and you will be expected to use and work in English during the clases. A good level of confidence of working in English is therefore recommended.  But your English does not need to be perfect, just good enough, and will benefit from this practice.

Location and dates

Teacher

Tim Smithers: I’m a designer researcher and teacher. My early research was on computational implementations of matrix methods for structural design and analysis, including parallel hardware and parallel algorithms to do this, mostly for light weight structures, which I became interested when I studied aeronautical engineering. Since then I have mostly worked in Artificial Intelligence in Design and Behaviour based robotics research, but I have also worked, with others, on research topics in the Arts, Engineerings, Humanities, and Sciences. This all involved working with diferent people from diferent disciplines, in diferent collaborations, large and small, and, in diferent research groups and Labs in diferent parts of the world, including Australia, EU, UK, and USA. I have long been interested in the practices of good research, and how to help PhDers learn the foundations of these needed practices. Since 2010 I have worked as a freelance researcher and teacher, designing and teaching courses on the Foundations of Research Practices for mixed discipline groups of PhDers, and helping research leaders design their research programmes and strengthen their research team practices, and occasionally I do reviewing for the Research Executive Agency (REA) of the EU Commission. I still design things and do research. Currently I work on a topic in Number Theory in a small collaboration; on an old but still little understood question in Behaviour modulation and selection in robots (and animals); and, on the non-entailed but rational actions, or moves, of efective exploration and discovery in designing, for which I do sound design by drawing, and use (Good Old Fashioned) symbol processing AI techniques to build systems to investigate and understand these kinds of originating the new moves in designing. I also make drawings and paintings by programming (in Logo) and printing the final result.

More about what I’ve done and where is described on my LinkedIn profile page, and many of my publications are available on Academia.

Group size

There is a maximum of 18 students in Donostia-San Sebastián and in Leioa, and 15 in Vitoria-Gasteiz.

Registration

Competences to be acquired by the doctoral student (Royal Decree 99/2011)

• a) Systematic understanding of a field of study and mastery of research skills and methods related to that field.
• b) Ability to conceive, design or create, implement and adopt a substantial process of research or creation.
• c) Ability to contribute to the expansion of the frontiers of knowledge through original research.
• d) Ability to critically analyse, evaluate and synthesise new and complex ideas.
• e) Ability to communicate with the academic and scientific community and with society in general about their fields of knowledge in the modes and languages in common use in their international scientific community.
• f) Ability to promote, in academic and professional contexts, scientific, technological, social, artistic or cultural progress within a knowledge-based society.

Objectives

The objective of the ResPub2025 course are to help PhDers develop and strengthen the practices and skills need to design and prepare good quality research publications: practices and skills needed by all researchers.

PhDers will learn how to identify properly the research outcome to be reported; how to assemble all the relevant and needed research materials and documentation needed to present and explain this research outcome in an honest way; how to decide where to publish and who the intended readers are; how to design an attractive, accessible, reader-centred form for your publication, with a complete specification of this; and, how to plan and do the production work needed to render this specification into a good quality research publication ready for submission, with help on the writing practices needed to do this.

A further objective of this course is to provide an opportunity for PhDers to know more of the research practices of people working in different disciplines, on different topics, in different ways, and to engage in useful and interesting discussion about what is similar and what is different in all this research.

Format

The course is composed of four three-hour classes run over four weeks, with a 15 minute break about mid-way through each class. Practical work -- which will involve developing critical comments on set readings, the development of a complete publication design specification, and a writing exercise -- will be done in groups of three or four PhDers from the same class group. This will be set each week to be completed and presented for the following week: three in total. This practical work will need between four to five hours each week, including working with the other people in your group.

All classes will work as seminars, and include both presented material and open discussion.  So, PhDers should come prepared to make their own notes, and actively engage in, and contribute to, each class.

Content

The first three classes of this course cover the following aspects of designing and preparing a research publication.

• Properly identifying your research outcome to be communicated, assembling and organising all your documented notes, records, and data from what you did to arrive at this outcome, and how to decide where to publish your research communication.
• Designing, specifying, dimensioning, and planning the production of your research publication.
• Producing and preparing your research communication for submission (including research writing in English), and responding to referee reports and editor’s requests.
• In the fourth, and last, class each practical work group will make a short presentation of what they did for each of the three set practicals, followed by some questions and discussion of what they present.

See more

Foundations of Research Practices

FRP Words of Recommendation : "What PhDers say ..."

This course is offered in collaboration with Euskampus Fundazioa.