Aim To explore the attitudes that doctoral students share with each other in an online postgraduate discussion forum.

Background The supervisory role is pivotal to the successful completion of a PhD. Student satisfaction surveys are implemented by some universities, but there is currently no research that has investigated PhD students’ experiences of supervision in the less formal environment of an online postgraduate discussion forum.

Data sources Data were collected between September and December 2012 from the Postgraduate Forum, which receives posts from the global student community. The keywords used in the search were ‘supervisor(s)’ and ‘supervision’. The data were analysed using thematic analysis.

Review methods All relevant titles and posts from between January 2002 and the end of December 2012 were searched.

Discussion The authors discovered five major themes: communication difficulties, control and engagement, academic bullying, lack of trust, and desertion. The relationship between students and supervisors is vital to successful PhD completion, and this study has provided some of the experiences students share with each other in an online postgraduate discussion forum.

Conclusions The online discussion forum provided an insight into students’ perspectives of supervision but as it is asynchronous, there is limited analysis. Further research incorporating synchronous data collection methods would be helpful to examine students’ experiences in greater detail.

Implications for research/practice This study shows how an online postgraduate forum can be used as a source of data to gain an insight into PhD students’ perspectives of supervision.