So you want to write from your PhD thesis. Where to start, you might ask?

Your first job is to decide whether your PhD is a book – or not. Perhaps the thesis could be a book but won’t because of the job and career demands you’re facing. Either way, let’s start this conversation by assuming that there’s no book, or at least not yet. You’ve decided to write papers for peer reviewed journals.

The immediate temptation is to try to condense your entire thesis into one paper. This is not an easy task. If it took you an entire thesis of eighty to a hundred thousand words to answer your research question, chances are that you aren’t going to be able to condense al that complexity into a mere seven or eight thousand. You need to break your thesis down into manageable pieces. Each piece a paper.

The good news is that most monograph (Big Book) PhDs can support more than one paper. Generally, it’s several. So the big question is where to start chopping it up.

Well, here’s a possibility to try out. Start by thinking about what is common to the thesis and the refereed paper in a journal.

You know that journals are knowledge-building communities. And journal editors are looking for papers that add to what their readers already know. This might be a new way of looking at something, some new empirical data, a different interpretation of a phenomenon, literatures brought to a familiar topic to open a new avenue of thinking. And so on.

This might sound familiar. In fact it connects with what happens in the thesis. You argued in your thesis conclusion, and probably in your viva, that your research had made a number of contributions to knowledge, you’d added to the field.

Both the thesis and the journal article are to do with adding to what is already known.

So one way to start thinking about possible papers is to go straight to your conclusion and see what you wrote about what was novel and significant arising from your project. What did you say were your contributions?

You could even do that now….

Perhaps a reminder about what a contribution looks like. Imagine that you said you had provided important local knowledge about how, say, a particular policy was playing out. Or you investigated a little known event that happened a while ago which was actually pretty important. Or you had interpreted a set of texts in a new way. You might also have done something interesting in your research process, perhaps used a new method, or perhaps you found a novel solution to a particular methods based problem. You might also have had something different to say about some minor aspects of the study: these were integral to the overall contribution, but were also a contribution in their own right. And, wait there’s more, you’d also put together formerly disparate literatures to offer new insights.

Why not jot down your PhD contributions now?

Check out that list. Im sure it’s exciting to revisit. And here’s the thing. Whatever your claims to contribution were, chances are that each one of these could be the basis of a paper. Chances are that if you said this thing here is novel in the field and the examiners agreed, then a journal community will think the same.

Once you’ve got a handle on a new/significant thing you have to offer, you need to look for the journals where readers will recognise and appreciate it. You can then frame your paper up in terms of what ‘stuff’ is already part of the field and what you can add.

Another way to think about papers and the PhD is to ask yourself what current hot topic or old sticky problem your research might help with. Does your analysis have some take on something that readers know is important?

But in both cases you need to ask yourself what questions this journal community is interested in. What do they talk about? Then ask yourself, What (partial) answer do I have to offer? Does your paper help to fill in some blank spots and if so, how and why is that important? You may find yourself taking an angle on a topic that isn’t exactly the same as your thesis. And you will probably find you’re not answering the same question as you had in your thesis. That’s fine. You’re not rewriting the thesis.,

You’ll have gathered by now that you need to be very specific about any possible paper. Rather than say I’ll write about x, you need to think about the contribution – exactly what new chunk of stuff you’re going to add to what, where, and why it is important that you do.

Another way to think about writing from the PhD is to say that you now need to focus on what your peers want to read and will be interested in, rather than what you wanted to research and write about. Ask yourself how can I inform my field?

I’m going to continue writing about writing from the PhD in the next post. But in the meantime you might also want to see if your library has Helen Kara and Janet Salmon’s book (2019) Publishing  from your doctoral research: create and use a publication strategy (Routledge). It has a load of useful advice and exercises you can do to find out where and how to write from the PhD.