How involved should doctoral supervisors be in the literature search and literature review writing?

Doctoral supervision is a subtle but complex form of teaching in higher education, where supervisor-to-candidate expectations including support around the literature are important, supervisory practices and candidate starting points can be disparate not always discussed. This paper uses autoethnographic reflections practitioner inquiry to explore: How involved should supervisors search review writing? issue arose following transition from postgraduate an academic supervising candidates, co-facilitating supervisor development programmes researching doctoral supervision. proposes that involvement or could classed as operating on conceptual model: ‘sliding scale’. Readers asked consider different tensions this practice invited address them using scale’ encourage conversations with candidates education teaching.