Investigation into the Research on Doctoral Writing: A Synthesis of Recent Research (2010-2019)

Doctoral writing has been concerned by linguistic scholars and the practitioners of English for academic purposes. This review explores the literature on doctoral writing which got published in peer-reviewed international journals of English between 2010 and 2019 to examine three questions: (1) From which perspectives do the recent researches adopt when examining doctoral writing of the ESOL students? (2) What methodology do the authors apply to research doctoral writing? (3) What kind of text or resource was analyzed by the authors? The goal of the review is to provide the pedagogical suggestions to the future teaching of doctoral writing and viable supports for the writing practice of doctoral students by a comprehensive analysis of the current research. After the overall search on Scopus, 210 titles and abstracts have been searched out through a combination of search terms. The inclusion and exclusion criteria have been used to identify the qualified articles for this study and disqualify the possibly irrelevant articles from the included. Ultimately, 82 articles have been confirmed to be further reviewed for the solution of research questions. This review indicates the relationship between doctoral writing and pedagogical and social context is complex, and thus necessary supports from inside and outside of doctoral community need to be given to improve the writing competence of doctoral students.