Upon submitting your thesis, hearing this statement must feel like a moment of complete joy and pride. After spending years researching, writing, submitting, and defending your thesis, you have finally sent your work out into the world.
However, as time passes, you may realize that your thesis is not necessarily the best format for sharing your research with a wider academic audience. Most researchers are more likely to read a focused 10–15 page paper about the most important part of your research than dig through a 500-page, book-style thesis.
After completing the gigantic task of writing, submitting, and defending your Ph.D. thesis, the next pragmatic step may be to convert a few parts of your thesis into journal articles.
You can often create one or more journal articles by working through your thesis manuscript. While reviewing your thesis, you may discover that a few chapters, research questions, or findings can be developed into separate articles. The research material you gathered during your research can provide you with much of the material you need to create a journal article.
However, there is often confusion around converting a thesis to a journal article. These questions range from “What is the need for converting a thesis to an article?” and “Is it legitimate to do so?” to “Is converting a thesis to a journal article considered self-plagiarism?”
This guide explains how to convert a thesis or dissertation into a journal article, what you need to change, and what to check before submitting it to a journal.
Why Publish Articles from Thesis?
It is pretty well known that a research paper asserts much credibility to the author. So, the easiest way to create your first research paper is through your thesis or dissertation. Besides, you will come across many benefits once you have published the first article from your thesis. These can include:
1) Career Boost
A mere bullet point mentioning you have authored a journal article will be an outstanding achievement and addition to your CV. It generally takes a year or two to complete a thesis. Since you have already done the research, you do not need to conduct new research or collect facts. This way, you can save a significant amount of time and publish your research.
You may also be able to create multiple research papers from a thesis if it contains several distinct research questions, studies, or findings.
2) Greater Outreach
What happened to your thesis after submission? Probably nothing more than becoming part of your institutions’ archives. It is the usual case with every thesis in most institutions worldwide. However, if you transform that into a journal article, it reaches a far greater audience, surpassing your institution's internal corridors.
3) Further Develop Your Research
You have spent a lot of time and effort creating your thesis. Turning relevant parts of it into journal articles gives that research another opportunity to be read, discussed, and built upon.
It can also help you further develop your academic and research writing skills because a journal article requires you to present your research in a much more focused and concise format.
Can You Publish a Journal Article From a Thesis or Dissertation?
Multiple papers from the same thesis should make distinct contributions. The ICMJE overlapping-publication recommendations advise transparent citation of related work and substantive additions when manuscripts share a data set.
There are a lot of concerns and misconceptions that cloud scholars when it comes to publishing articles from theses. For example, scholars usually get thoughts like if journal publishers accept something that has already been a part of a thesis or dissertation or creating articles from a thesis might come under the purview of a duplicate submission, self-plagiarism, or copyright issues.
These questions are not entirely baseless. The answer can vary depending on the journal and the circumstances. The safest approach is to understand the journal's policies and be transparent about the relationship between your thesis and the manuscript.
Check the journal’s prior-publication policy
Many journals consider work previously included in a thesis, but policies vary by publisher and title. Check the target journal’s author instructions and disclose the thesis, its repository URL and any related manuscripts at submission. For example, Elsevier states that an academic thesis generally is not prior publication, with some title-specific exceptions.
However, if your institution has published your theses through its online channels, then it is prudent for you to inform the academic publisher about this. Staying transparent about the origin of your manuscript with your publisher is the best way to stay away from any unethical practices. The best solution here is to create a citation article for your thesis.
Check copyright and reuse rights
Copyright and reuse rights depend on your institution, funder agreements, previously published chapters and third-party figures or tables. Check the applicable licenses and obtain permission where needed before reusing substantial text or images in a journal manuscript.
Disclose overlap and revise reused text
A journal article can be generated easily from a few thesis chapters. Therefore, a journal article that has originated from a thesis or a dissertation is a part of it and not a copy. Additionally, it undergoes a rigorous peer-review process, bringing many differences between an article and your thesis. No one can charge you for duplicating your thesis for a journal article.
Cite the thesis when relevant, disclose any overlap to the editor and substantially revise the manuscript for the journal’s question, audience and format. A citation or quotation alone does not automatically resolve duplicate-publication or permissions concerns.
You should inform the publisher that the article has been developed from your thesis whenever the journal's policies require it. You may also need to provide a copy of your thesis or information about where and when it was first published.
Staying transparent and open with your editor can help you understand the procedures you need to follow and avoid publication-ethics violations.
Thesis vs. Journal Article: What's the Difference?
Before converting your thesis to a journal article, it is crucial that you first understand a few contrasting aspects of a journal article and a thesis.
First and foremost, the audience or the readers are very different for both the journal article and the thesis. In the case of a thesis, the audience is primarily the institutional committee that evaluates the quality of your research. In the case of a journal article, the readers are scientists or scholars in the same domain who are looking for research, theories, methods, and evidence relevant to their work.
Additionally, a thesis is created to serve the educational purpose of achieving a degree. On the other hand, an academic paper or journal article is published to communicate a focused research contribution to the academic community.
The format is also quite different.
A thesis can contain extensive background, literature, methodology, results, and discussion because its purpose is to document your research in considerable detail. A journal article needs to present the most relevant information in a shorter and more precise format.
Therefore, converting a thesis to a journal article is not simply about cutting the word count. You need to identify the strongest research story and rebuild the relevant material around it.
How to Convert a Thesis Into a Journal Article
Before creating your first article from your thesis, understand your target audience and the question your article is trying to answer. Simply put, you must know your audience and the answers they will be expecting from your article.
Keep the above-discussed points in mind and follow the elements below, revising them according to the requirements of your target publication.
1) Words limit
Quite pronounced and known to all that a journal article is of much shorter length than a thesis. While a thesis can be 8000-10000 words covering over 200+pages, a journal article can maximum go up to a few thousand words spanning over 5-7pages. Additionally, this length also varies from domain to domain and topic to topic.
Therefore, you must shorten each section very accurately. You need to trim the paragraphs so that the true essence should not get lost, and there should not be any redundancy, too. You must select the key important topics and include them in your academic paper.
2) Abstract
The abstract is the entry point of your academic paper. Therefore, you need to include and present the exciting points of the topic here but briefly. You need to curate it according to the instructions provided by your target journal. You must enquire and ensure whether they require a structured or unstructured abstract. Moreover, there is a growing trend of graphical and video abstracts.
3) Introduction
While writing the introduction, you must present the gaps in your chosen topic that led to the research. Next, you need to write a concise literature review to bring forth the past works and the new results that you aim to find out. In this section, you must specify the research problem and a background check over that topic.
4) Methods
You must have extensively provided details about your chosen methods and methodology in your thesis. However, you can not do the same here. You need to narrow it down to the methodology section, especially the experiments, surveys, and more you have adopted. You are not supposed to present a detailed discussion around the research methodology approach in the journal articles.
5) Results
You must be aware that a thesis must contain the details of every result with considerable discussions, whereas a journal only contains the result of the main findings. Therefore, while creating the result sections, ensure that you include the results or the findings that directly answer the research question. Also, you must provide hard evidence to back your results. Moreover, strict adherence to the standards of reporting results has to be followed.
6) Discussion
The discussion section of a journal article is meant to provide a brief interpretation of the results to display your understanding of the topic. Ensure that you keep the discussion section of your journal article clear and cut to the point. Be aware that by providing a discussion section, you demonstrate your interest and speculations in the future direction the research topic will adopt.
7) References
Do not just copy-paste the reference or citation list from your thesis to the article. You need to provide the relevant reference and citations you sought when conducting the research. You must ensure that the reference list you are putting here should be relevant to the topic. Sometimes, the academic publishers limit the number of references you can include, so properly enquire beforehand only over the number of references.
Final Checklist
Before submitting your article, make sure you have:
Identified one clear research question, argument, or finding
Selected an appropriate target journal
Followed the journal's word-count and formatting requirements
Condensed the literature review
Rewritten the introduction around a clear research gap
Included the relevant methodological details
Selected results that directly address the research question
Rewritten the discussion to interpret the findings
Created a new title and abstract for the article
Reviewed and updated the references
Checked the journal's prior-publication policy
Disclosed the thesis and related publications where required
Checked copyright and permissions for reused material
Reviewed the final manuscript for unnecessary overlap
Final Words
Publishing articles from the thesis is nowhere prohibited. In reality, if you discuss this idea with your peers, they will encourage you to do it. Just keep in mind the concept of thesis and journal articles, their differences, and the purpose each serves in a different context; you will be able to publish an article from your thesis easily.
Start by identifying the strongest research question or finding in your thesis. Choose a target journal, create a focused outline, and then rewrite the relevant material around that central contribution.
If you feel overwhelmed by the publisher's requirements or get confused about converting your thesis into a journal article, you can come over to the SciSpace Community. Submit your questions, and you can find answers from researchers and academics around the world.
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