How To Transform a PhD Thesis into Journal Articles

How To Transform a PhD Thesis into Journal Articles
Assuming that you have now chosen the most interesting and innovative aspect of your thesis to develop into an article and copied into a new file the material that you think might prove useful as you write your article, what should you do with it all? The answer will depend to some extent on the content and structure required by the journal(s) to which you would like to submit the paper, but still more important is what you want your paper to be and do. 

There are two especially important questions here: What do you wish to achieve by publishing the paper? And what kind of argument do you wish to make with the material you have chosen to discuss? Do you want, for instance, to build on current theories by either confirming or contradicting them? Do you intend to apply theories and results to real-life situations? Do you feel the need to report new discoveries and vital information to your scholarly community as quickly as possible? Will the argument you have made in your thesis about the material you plan to use in your paper be appropriate for the paper or will a slightly (or even very) different argument be more effective for this material now that it is isolated from the rest of the thesis? Remember that there is no need to repeat the argument(s) you constructed in your thesis, and revisions even to central claims of that thesis may prove effective. Your article will, after all, be an original piece of work that is for your readers (if not yourself) completely separate from your thesis, and it will be a better paper if you focus on developing a single compelling argument based on the material you have chosen to isolate.  

You will also need to provide a framework for the research you are borrowing and rewriting from your thesis. In a doctoral thesis there is usually considerable space in which to outline and review previous scholarship along with other background information, as well as to describe and discuss your methodology and its implications at length. The material for your paper has been severed from this larger framework, however, so it will require a new and more concise framework if it is to stand on its own as a complete article. Background scholarship should, for instance, be dealt with much more briefly, with the focus being to inform readers concisely about how your work in the article (not the thesis) fits into that scholarship, so source references will usually be limited to those specifically relevant to the material in the paper. Your methodology will still require careful and detailed description, but here, too, brevity should be combined with a precise focus on the research presented in the article. In short, the material you use from your thesis will need to appear in a tighter, thinner and more controlled theoretical and methodological framework than that used in your thesis, yet this framework will nonetheless need to provide everything necessary for readers to be able to understand the research reported in your article and its significance.