Students’ Perceptions of Doctoral Defense in Relation to Sociodemographic Characteristics

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

File attached, Thank you.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Please see the attached file.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

This a well considered, designed and implemented research project of the subjective aspects of the doctorate examination process.  The research is timely and should be of importance to all doctoral candidates who are subjected to a defense of their projects by committee.

Author Response

Please see the attached file

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear Author and Editor,

I would like to thank Education Sciences for the opportunity to read this manuscript. It presents a study of an important aspect of doing doctoral studies - the doctoral defense - which, although having been studied to some extent, would definitely benefit from more research. In other words, I think this paper would be a valuable contribution to the field of higher education studies and would like to see it published in the journal. However, for that to happen, I would suggest some revisions:

• It would be good if the value of the paper would be stated more clearly. Now, there is a mention that there is a gap in research. However, that alone is not enough to provide value. There is a brief mention of the importance/implications of the paper presented on lines 85 to 89 and again in the conclusion, on lines 1160-1163. However, I would like to see these parts elaborated a bit, both in the Introduction and the Discussion / Conclusion. This would also help to clarify who the audience of the paper is: who should read it, and why?
• Methods: It would be good if the author specified the number of each type of questions on lines 233-236. It is currently not clear, for example, what kind of open-ended questions there were, and how many. I have noticed that the survey will be supplementary material but it would be good to know a little bit more about it in the Methods section, if the author chooses to keep the qualitative analysis as part of the paper, which brings me to my next point.
• The qualitative analysis: It seems to me that the paper could make a valuable contribution with the quantitative analysis alone. This is because, as such, the current qualitative analysis is overshadowed by the quantitative aspect of the paper and therefore the paper becomes slightly imbalanced, as well as needlessly long. For example, there are only a few excerpts and a very modest amount of analysis of the answers to the open-ended questions. While they are definitely interesting, I'm wondering if they could be left for a future paper instead? In this way, the paper would become more concise, and would "flow" better.
• Section 4 (Results and Analysis) should perhaps be rethought a bit in terms of structure. As a reader, I'd expect to find answers to the research questions in a section titled in this way. That is the case but there is also now a lot of other information in this section, which does not correspond with the research questions - background information on the ones that responded, which might be more suitable to be included in the Methods section. The same goes with Section 4.3.1 as well - it sounds more like Methods (how the analysis was done) rather than results. The first actual results (which answer the RQs) seem to be presented in section 4.3.2 (Gender).
• Due to the low number of respondents in some demographic groups (which the author acknowledges well), I wonder if some strong adjectives such as "striking" (line 975) could be hedged a little bit? By this I mean that a low/high percentage in a category is not necessarily "striking" if the n is very low. Moreover, the paper states very often that "more research is needed", and while the statement itself is ok, I wonder if it could be all left in the conclusion, rather than repeating it several times in the Results. Otherwise the reader might be left with a feeling that the paper isn't saying anything conclusive about anything (which is not the case - the results are important). Finally, calling the study an exploratory one, or similar, might indicate clearly that the paper is more of a starting point for a series of other studies.
• Overall, the paper is very clearly written. The only minor issue that I noticed was the use of the word "defense" as a verb on lines 125 and 129 - I would replace it with "defend".

Author Response

Please see the attached document

Author Response File: Author Response.docx