Data & Statistics
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Who Gets a UKRI Studentship? Diversity Data on UK Doctoral Researchers (2026)
UKRI’s equalities monitoring on 5,165 funded studentship starts: 47% female, 10% declaring a disability, 2% Black — and a 35% non-disclosure rate that the funder itself says makes…
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How Big Should Your Sample Be? Sample Size Rules for Postgraduate Nursing and Health Research (2026)
No national dataset records what sample sizes postgraduate nursing dissertations actually achieve. What does exist is a body of published methodological conventions — Cohen’s effect sizes, the rule…
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What Do UK PhD Graduates Actually Do? Career Destinations and Earnings (2026 Data)
Vitae’s 2026 analysis of 10,690 UK doctoral graduates: 91% working, median earnings £42,000 at 15 months, and the share going into higher education down from about half to…
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Have You Cited a Retracted Paper? The Retraction Data, and How to Audit Your Own Bibliography (2026)
Around 50,000 retractions existed in the combined Crossref and Retraction Watch record when the two were merged into an open dataset in 2023 — and the data is…
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PhD Wellbeing and Supervision Satisfaction: What PRES 2025 Actually Shows (2026)
The Postgraduate Research Experience Survey 2025 in citable form: 89% satisfied with supervision, 63% positive about research culture, and one in five who considered leaving citing mental or…
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How Long Does a UK PhD Actually Take? Registration Periods, Continuation Status and the Fees Nobody Mentions (2026)
Three years is the normal period; four is the maximum at most institutions. The gap between them is a formally defined continuation period with its own fee, its…
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How Many PhD Students Are There in the UK? The HESA Data (2026)
The published HESA figures on the UK’s postgraduate research population: 121,175 PGR students in 2024/25, 110,455 of them on research doctorates — with the five-year series and the…
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UK PhD Stipends and Studentship Funding in 2026: The Published Figures
The UKRI minimum doctoral stipend and fee figures for 2026, what the London weighting does and does not cover, why no sector-wide award duration exists, and how many…
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PhD Viva Outcomes in the UK: What the Data From 127 Institutions Actually Shows (2026)
There is no national UK dataset of viva pass rates — and the figure circulating online is not what people think it is. What can be evidenced is…