ABSTRACT Failure in doctoral education is a taboo topic for many supervisors and doctoral candidates. Failure in thesis doctoral examination is hard to admit to or explain and has not been deeply investigated. We aim to disrupt the silence around failure in the doctoral context and generate new discussions relevant to doctoral education. We conduct a theoretical integrative review (TIR), which allows for the inclusion of primary research studies, along with other documents (such as policy documents), in the international context. We seek to explore the learning potentials presented by a better understanding of failure to influence the broader debates about the future of the doctorate in times of uncertainty and crisis.
Stracke et al. (Mon,) studied this question.