For young researchers, the pressure to
publish is immense. To establish their credibility in the science
community, it is imperative for postdoctoral researchers to have at
least a few publications to their name. To add to their woes, most new
scholars find it daunting to write articles for publication and often
find themselves struggling to even come up with a research question.
One good way to start publishing
articles soon after your PhD is to revisit the material you have
gathered during your doctoral research. Unlike a master’s thesis, a doctoral thesis or dissertation involves original research. Most PhD
students invest months in collecting and analyzing data and writing
their dissertation. Why not make optimum use of all this material and
convert your thesis into one or more journal articles? Apart from being
the easiest and most logical next step toward your first publication,
there are quite a few benefits of creating journal papers from your
completed thesis. These include career enhancement, personal
satisfaction, and a wider outreach that allows you to contribute more
significantly to your field.
Some authors are concerned that journals might not accept content that has already been published as a thesis or dissertation,
or that submitting such articles to a journal might be considered
self-plagiarism or duplicate submission or lead to copyright issues.
While this is field and case specific, in general, journals are not
against publishing articles that have been published as thesis
elsewhere. There are several reasons for this.
The primary reason why most editors
accept such articles is that thesis or dissertations are traditionally
published by university presses, with a few copies printed for internal
circulation. Since these are not widely circulated, publishing a journal article is a good way to make the research accessible to the science
community. However, there are some exceptions where the thesis is
published by an academic publisher and made available online. Some
journals might have a problem with this. In such cases, it is preferable
to publish the journal article before the thesis is published.
However, if your thesis has already been published by an academic
publisher, you should inform the journal editor about this before
submitting your article, and seek his/her guidance.
Secondly, unlike journal articles that
require authors to transfer copyright to the journal before publication,
the copyright for a thesis usually remains with the author. Thus,
authors are technically free to reuse the content from a thesis or dissertation, and the question of copyright breach is ruled out. Of
course, you should make sure that you include a copyright page in your
dissertation and get your copyright registered.
Additionally, a thesis and a journal
article are completely different in terms of overall approach and
format. To convert a thesis/dissertation into a journal article, it has
to be rewritten and refined. More often, a journal article is crafted
based on an excerpt or a chapter of a thesis, and sometimes, multiple
articles can be published based on different thesis chapters. The
journal article undergoes further revisions during peer review, which
makes it substantially different from the thesis, thus solving the
problem of duplication. Charges of self-plagiarism can be avoided by
citing the thesis/dissertation in the journal paper, and using block
quotes wherever content has been copied verbatim.
Most importantly, you should inform the
editor at the time of submission that your article is based on your
thesis, mention when and where it has been published, and state your
willingness to provide a copy if required. Being open and honest with
the editor is always an advantage as he or she will then be able to
guide you and suggest ways to avoid any ethical glitches that you might
be unaware of.
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