Guidance for turning a thesis into a journal article

The journal welcomes doctoral students and those who have recently attained their research degrees to submit their work for publication.

Authors should consider how they could draw from their thesis (which maybe up to 100,000 words long) to produce an article of a much shorter length of 6000 words.

The audience for the article is very different from that of a thesis. The thesis is for the assessment of the student’s work. It is designed to demonstrate a systematic, in depth study that has led to new contributions to knowledge and at the same time the thesis shows the student’s intellectual journey – how they have learned the skills and knowledge to be a researcher in their field.

The article is more focused on a particular research question, context, method, findings, analysis/discussion and conclusions. The readership for the article will be informed and interested in the topic to a certain extent. They will not need to read about the philosophical underpinnings of the methodology in great detail, nor will they need to be informed of established theoretical perspectives that are not directly pertinent to the study reported in the article.

With careful selection, editing and refinement 2-3 articles can potentially be harvested from the thesis. Do not try to write an article that addresses the totality of your doctoral research.

Decide what the important aspects of the thesis are that fit in with the focus of the journal. If there was a smaller pilot study as part of the doctoral study it maybe that this is sufficient to report on. Or there may have been a range of interventions or experiments - it could be that focusing on one of these would be enough to create a coherent article that has some new insights.

Another approach to selecting a topic from the thesis would be to reflect on the findings and insights - is there a line of enquiry that could be pulled out and be used as the basis of an article?

Once the topic or focus of the article is decided upon, look at how articles in the journal are structured. There may be some similarities to the way a thesis is structured, but the word count in each section would be a lot less. Calculate how many words there would be in each section; it is best to stick to the word count limitations throughout the article.

It is recommended that authors focus on the current policy and/or practice context rather than looking back into the past. The literature review section should focus on current publications and establish a gap that the article seeks to address. Theories should be well-described and applied, but only those that are pertinent to the article, it is best not to refer to many theoretical perspectives as one may do in a thesis.

Be thorough in describing the method, analysis and limitations whilst being more succinct about the philosophical underpinnings of the methodology. Think about what the reader needs to know to make sense of this particular article and cut out anything that could be left for another publication.

Think about the best ways to represent the findings, and remember again some of the strands or findings could be selected and others could be the start of another article.

In the conclusion section, be careful not to over claim, be tentative and be open where there needs to be more research undertaken. Make some suggestions for improving policy and practice, but qualify these in terms of the limitations of the study and the contexts to which the suggestions may apply.

It can be a challenge not including sections of the thesis which have taken months and years to write. However, it is better for the coherence and clarity of the article if the author is purposeful in excluding material that is not relevant to the article.