Still Yours
AI and your doctorate
Practical help for doctoral researchers who want to use AI well and still own their work.
The book, a free planning guide, the companion toolkit, the course, and talks for universities and research teams, all in one place.
The book · Springer Nature · November 2026
Still Yours: A Doctoral Researcher's Guide to AI
Doctoral research is one of the most demanding things you'll do. AI is promising to make it faster, smoother and more productive, and some of that is true. The difficulty is knowing which parts.
Still Yours gives you a way of deciding, task by task, what to hand over and what to keep, so that the decisions you make about AI are ones you can still explain when you're sitting in your viva. I wrote it with my co-author, Michael Rowe, for doctoral researchers in the broadest sense: PhD, EdD, DBA, professional and practice-based doctorates, and doctorates by publication.
Free for every subscriber
Not sure whether to use AI on a piece of work? Start here.
Should I use AI for this? is a free one-page planning guide for doctoral researchers. You use it when you're planning a piece of work, a chapter, an analysis, a search, a stage of the project, rather than every time you open a tool. The same questions the book uses, on one page you can keep.
The guide comes with the Weekly Research Recharge, my weekly email of practical tools, ideas and resources for researchers.
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Go further when you're ready
Tools for your own work, a course, and talks for your university or research team.
Coming soon
The companion toolkit
Interactive tools that turn the book's questions into something you can use on your own work. Decide what to hand to AI, write down your own terms for using AI in your doctorate, keep a record of your AI decisions, and rehearse defending them before your viva.
Available on its own, and included with the course.
Opens November 2026
The Doctoral AI Operating System
Seven short, self-paced modules covering the five ways you'll work with AI across a doctorate. Each pairs a worked example with practice and a developmental check, so you build good judgement by using it on your own work.
Comes with the companion toolkit and a hardback copy of Still Yours. You don't need to have read the book first.
Available now
Talks, workshops and consultancy
Keynotes, workshops and consultancy on AI in doctoral education, for universities, doctoral colleges, research teams and conferences. Guides and webinars for companies that build AI tools for researchers.
About me
I'm Benita Olivier, Professor of Rehabilitation at Oxford Brookes University and Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust, where I build research capacity and capability among health and care professionals. I've supervised doctoral researchers for many years, and I founded Research Masterminds to support postgraduate researchers around the world.
I wrote Still Yours with my co-author, Michael Rowe, Associate Professor at the University of Lincoln.
Still Yours: A Doctoral Researcher's Guide to AI, Benita Olivier and Michael Rowe, Springer Nature, 2026.
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