dissertation article journal

Adapting a Dissertation or Thesis Into a Journal Article

Dissertations or theses are typically required of graduate students. Undergraduate students completing advanced research projects may also write senior theses or similar types of papers. Once completed, the dissertation or thesis is often submitted (with modifications) as a manuscript for publication in a scholarly journal. Thus, the dissertation or thesis often provides the foundation for a new researcher’s body of published work.

Writers will first want to determine whether the work in their dissertation or thesis merits publication. If it does, we then provide guidance on how to adapt a dissertation or thesis for submission to a journal.

Adapting a dissertation or thesis into a journal article is covered in the seventh edition APA Style Publication Manual in Section 12.1

Deciding to submit a dissertation or thesis for publication

When deciding whether to publish the work in your dissertation or thesis, first consider whether the findings tell a compelling story or answer important questions. Whereas dissertations and theses may present existing knowledge in conjunction with new work, published research should make a novel contribution to the literature. For example, some of your original research questions might be suitable for publication, and others may have been sufficiently addressed in the literature already. Likewise, some of your results may warrant additional experiments or analyses that could help answer the research questions more fully, and you may want to conduct these analyses before seeking publication.

You may also want to consider such factors as whether the current sample size provides sufficient power to adequately inform the analyses and whether additional analyses might clarify ambiguous findings. Consultation with colleagues can help evaluate the potential of the manuscript for publication as well as the selection of an appropriate journal to which to submit it. For information on selecting and prioritizing a journal (and tips for avoiding predatory or deceptive journals), see Sections 12.2 to 12.4 of the Publication Manual .

Adapting a dissertation or thesis for publication

Once a decision is made to convert your dissertation or thesis into a manuscript for submission to a journal, you will want to focus attention on adapting it for publication. By attending to brevity and focus, writing style, relevant literature review and data analyses, and appropriate interpretation of the results or findings, you can enhance the fit of your manuscript for journal publication. Editors and reviewers readily recognize an article that has been hastily converted; careful attention when reformatting the dissertation or thesis is likely to increase the manuscript’s potential for serious consideration and eventual publication.

There are several steps writers seeking to prepare their dissertation or thesis for publication can take beforehand:

• Look at articles in the field and in relevant journals to see what structure and focus are appropriate for their work and how they are formatted.
• Request and consider the input of advisors, colleagues, or other coauthors who contributed to the research on which the dissertation or thesis is based.
• Review an article submitted to a journal alongside their advisor (with permission from the journal editor) or serve as a reviewer for a student competition to gain firsthand insight into how authors are evaluated when undergoing peer review.

The original research reported in a dissertation and thesis can then be reformatted for journal submission following one of two general strategies: the multiple-paper strategy or the conversion strategy.

Multiple-paper strategy

The quickest strategy for converting (or “flipping”) a dissertation or thesis into one or more publishable articles is to use a multiple-paper format when initially writing the dissertation or thesis. This involves structuring the dissertation or thesis used to fulfill the requirements for a degree as a series of shorter papers that are already formatted for journal submission (or close to it). These papers are usually each the length of a journal article, conceptually similar, and come from the same overarching project—but can stand alone as independent research reports. Consult your university’s editorial office to confirm that this is an approved format for your dissertation or thesis and to obtain the specific guidelines.

Conversion strategy

A second strategy is to reformat and convert a dissertation or thesis into a journal article after completing your dissertation or thesis defense to fit the scope and style of a journal article. This often requires adjustments to the following elements:

• Length: Brevity is an important consideration for a manuscript to be considered for journal publication, particularly in the introduction and Discussion sections. Making a dissertation or thesis publication-ready often involves reducing a document of over 100 pages to one third of its original length. Shorten the overall paper by eliminating text within sections and/or eliminating entire sections. If the work examined several research questions, you may consider separating distinct research questions into individual papers; narrow the focus to a specific topic for each paper.
• Abstract: The abstract may need to be condensed to meet the length requirements of the journal. Journal abstract requirements are usually more limited than college or university requirements. For instance, most APA journals limit the abstract length to 250 words.
• Introduction section: One of the major challenges in reformatting a dissertation or thesis is paring down its comprehensive literature review to a more succinct one suitable for the introduction of a journal article. Limit the introductory text to material relating to the immediate context of your research questions and hypotheses. Eliminate extraneous content or sections that do not directly contribute to readers’ knowledge or understanding of the specific research question(s) or topic(s) under investigation. End with a clear description of the questions, aims, or hypotheses that informed your research.
• Method section: Provide enough information to allow readers to understand how the data were collected and evaluated. Refer readers to previous works that informed the current study’s methods or to supplemental materials instead of providing full details of every step taken or the rationale behind them.
• Results section: Be selective in choosing analyses for inclusion in the Results section and report only the most relevant ones. Although an unbiased approach is important to avoid omitting study data, reporting every analysis that may have been run for the dissertation or thesis often is not feasible, appropriate, or useful in the limited space of a journal article. Instead, ensure that the results directly contribute to answering your original research questions or hypotheses and exclude more ancillary analyses (or include them as supplemental materials). Be clear in identifying your primary, secondary, and any exploratory analyses.
• Discussion section: Adjust the discussion according to the analyses and results you report. Check that your interpretation and application of the findings are appropriate and do not extrapolate beyond the data. A strong Discussion section notes area of consensus with and divergence from previous work, taking into account sample size and composition, effect size, limitations of measurement, and other specific considerations of the study.
• References: Include only the most pertinent references (i.e., theoretically important or recent), especially in the introduction and literature review, rather than providing an exhaustive list. Ensure that the works you cite contribute to readers’ knowledge of the specific topic and to understanding and contextualizing your research. Citation of reviews and meta-analyses can guide interested readers to the broader literature while providing an economical way of referencing prior studies.
• Tables and figures: Make sure that tables or figures are essential and do not reproduce content provided in the text.

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How to Write a Journal Article from a Thesis

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You are almost done with your PhD thesis and want to convert it into a journal article. Or, you’re initiating a career as a journal writer and intend to use your thesis as a starting point for an article. Whatever your situation, turning a thesis into a journal article is a logical step and a process that eventually every researcher completes. But…how to start?

The first thing to know about converting a thesis into a journal article is how different they are:

Thesis Characteristics:

• Meets academic requirements
• Reviewed by select committee members
• Contains chapters
• Lengthy, no word limits
• Table of contents
• Lengthy research of literature
• IRB approval described in detail
• Description and copies of tools used
• All findings presented
• Verb tenses may vary

Journal Article Characteristics:

• Meets journalistic standards
• Reviewed by a panel of “blind” reviewers
• Word limits
• Manuscript format
• Succinct research of literature
• IRB described in 1 to 3 sentences
• Essential and succinct tool information
• Selected findings presented
• Verb tenses are fairly consistent

Converting your thesis to a journal article may be complex, but it’s not impossible.

A thesis is a document of academic nature, so it’s more detailed in content. A journal article, however, is shorter, highlighting key points in a more succinct format. Adapting a thesis for conversion into a journal article is a time-consuming and intricate process that can take you away from other important work. In that case, Elsevier’s Language Editing services may help you focus on important matters and provide a high-quality text for submission in no time at all.

If you are going to convert a thesis into a journal article, with or without professional help, here is a list of some of the steps you will likely have to go through:

1. Identify the best journal for your work

• Ensure that your article is within the journal’s aim and scope. How to find the right journal? Find out more .
• Check the journal’s recommended structure and reference style

2. Shorten the length of your thesis

• Treat your thesis as a separate work
• Paraphrase but do not distort meaning
• Select and repurpose parts of your thesis

3. Reformat the introduction as an abstract

• Shorten the introduction to 100-150 words, but maintain key topics to hold the reader’s attention.
• Use the introduction and discussion as basis for the abstract

4. Modify the introduction

• If your thesis has more than one research question or hypothesis, which are not all relevant for your paper, consider combining your research questions or focusing on just one for the article
• Use previously published papers (at least three) from the target journal as examples

5. Tighten the methods section

• Keep the discussion about your research approach short

6. Report main findings in the results

• Expose your main findings in the results section in concise statements

7. Discussion must be clear and concise

• Begin by providing an interpretation of your results: “What is it that we have learned from your research?”
• Situate the findings to the literature
• Discuss how your findings expand known or previous perspectives
• Briefly present ways in which future studies can build upon your work and address limitations in your study

8. Limit the number of references

• To choose the most relevant and recent
• To format them correctly
• Consider using a reference manager system (e.g. Mendeley ) to make your life easier

If you are not a proficient English speaker, the task of converting a thesis into a journal article might make it even more difficult. At Elsevier’s Language Editing services we ensure that your manuscript is written in correct scientific English before submission. Our professional proofers and editors check your manuscript in detail, taking your text as our own and with the guarantee of maximum text quality.

Language editing services by Elsevier Author Services:

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Transforming a Dissertation Chapter into a Published Article

By  Faye Halpern and James Phelan

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As a dissertation writer, you are extremely well positioned to produce a publishable journal article because you know the current scholarly conversations on your topic intimately and have figured out ways to intervene in them. In fact, it might seem that the journey from dissertation chapter to journal article ought to be a relaxing day trip: extract the chapter from the rest of the dissertation, delete any references to other chapters and to your new manuscript as itself a chapter, trim as necessary to fit the word limit of your chosen journal, and send it off.

You might round off the day by kicking back and rewarding yourself with an adult beverage. Such thinking is likely to feel intuitively correct because of a common way we conceive of the dissertation’s purpose: to demonstrate to already-certified members of your profession (aka your committee) that you have mastered the fundamental research skills of that profession by carrying out a well-designed and original research project.

But our experience as editors of scholarly journals has taught us that effective chapters and publishable journal submissions have important differences. Indeed, the cumulative effect of those differences makes the two modes closely related but ultimately distinct genres. Consequently, moving from chapter to article is an act not of extraction but of adaptation.

To be sure, the challenges of this generic adaptation are not as great as those involved in adaptations from one medium to another (e.g., Greta Gerwig directing Little Women ), but we believe that thinking about your task as more than an extraction-cum-copyediting will increase your chances for success. In what follows, we will focus on the nexus of writer, audience and purpose in each genre in order to highlight their differences and, thus, help you identify strategies for your adaptation.

To illustrate our points, we will refer to a hypothetical dissertation within our shared field of literary studies: an investigation of the uses of unreliable narration in the British and American modernist novel that seeks to contribute to conversations within the fields of narrative theory and modernist studies. While this one example won’t represent all dissertations in all fields, we hope our commentary on it will help you think through the opportunities and challenges of your own possible adaptations.

Audiences: In-House/Out in the Field

Attending to audience helps identify what are paradoxically the most subtle and most significant differences between the genres -- subtle because their effects are easy to miss, significant because they influence so many other properties of the two genres. You write your dissertation chapters for your committee members, and you write your journal articles for a much larger audience of scholars in your field, most of whom don’t know you from Adam. Since your committee members are representatives of your field, you have reasons to think that writing for them shouldn’t be different from writing for the audience of a scholarly journal. If your committee members judge your work highly, won’t readers for journal articles do the same?

As the adage has it, appearances are deceiving, and thus the answer is “not necessarily.” Your committee members do not apply the same standards to your chapters that they do to others’ journal articles, and readers for journals will not apply the standards of your committee members to your submissions. Understanding why opens up the differences between the two genres.

Let us return to the purpose of the dissertation: to demonstrate to already-certified members of your profession that you have mastered the fundamental research skills of that profession by carrying out a well-designed and original research project. In contrast, the purpose of a journal article is to make a contribution to scholarly conversations about significant issues in a given field that substantially alters the dimensions, directions or stakes of those conversations.

Again, the differences may appear insignificant, but thinking about them, first from your perspective as writer and then from the perspective of your committee members as readers, uncovers their importance. From your perspective, one of the main challenges of writing a dissertation is that you’ve never written one before. Consequently, you’re undertaking a task that you learn how to do only by doing it, a situation that puts you in the Kafkaesque position of being fully ready to write your dissertation only after you’ve finished it. What is true of the dissertation is also true of its individual chapters. It’s therefore unlikely that a simple extraction will be sufficient.

In addition, the criteria for assessing quality in each genre aren’t exactly the same. Your committee members apply three main criteria: 1) Does the chapter answer the so-what question and thus make a worthwhile contribution to the relevant scholarly conversations? 2) Does it demonstrate that you have acquired the skills -- from doing thorough research to analyzing your objects of study to marshaling these materials into a coherent argument -- to do publishable research? and 3) Does it fit well with the rest of the dissertation? For journal reviewers, the question of fit is off the table, and the demonstration of skills is simply a necessary condition. Thus, their main criterion is the answer to the so-what question, and they put an even greater premium on the significance of your answer.

Suppose the writer of our hypothetical dissertation seeks to adapt a chapter on Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms that traces the evolution of Frederic Henry’s narration from unreliable to reliable and concludes with a few paragraphs linking this evolution to Hemingway’s innovations with the genre of narrative tragedy. The writer’s committee has applauded the chapter for its insightful close readings of the narration, its move from the fine-grained analyses to a big-picture argument, and its fit with the larger dissertation because it shows how Hemingway adds a distinctive use of unreliability within the period.

But to make the work publishable, the writer would need to adapt the chapter so that it clearly identifies both its central question(s) and the significance of its response to the so-what question. Perhaps the writer would shift the focus so that the dominant question is about Hemingway’s generic innovation with narrative tragedy, creating the need to give more prominence to his handling of the plot. Perhaps the writer would decide to offer a direct comparison/contrast between Hemingway’s handling of unreliability and, say, William Faulkner’s. This shift would of course involve drawing on material from the chapter on Faulkner, but it would also mean deciding on whether to use that material primarily in the service of highlighting Hemingway’s technique or to give it equal standing and thus seek mutual illumination.

The writer’s choices about the central question(s) would also have consequences for how they make the case for the significance of their intervention. Guided by the need to establish that significance, the writer would adjust their treatment of work by other scholars, engaging more or less fully with those discussed in the chapter and even perhaps bringing others into the conversation.

Core Argument: Interdependence/Self-Sufficiency

Since an effective chapter is well integrated into the larger argument of your whole dissertation, it is interdependent with other chapters. Since a journal article, by contrast, is a stand-alone entity, you need to find strategies to move from interdependence to self-sufficiency.

A first step, as noted above, is to identify the presuppositions or ideas from other chapters you and your committee members bring to this one. A second is to identify the elements of the chapter that tie it to the rest of the dissertation. These elements may be extended passages or allusions to what comes before or after, or, indeed, things taken for granted because already discussed.

A third step follows closely from the second: examining whether those elements are crucial to your case for the specific contribution you want the journal article to make. If so, then you need to find a way to include them that will be clear to readers who are not part of your dissertation conversation. If not, you obviously need to delete them, but you should also ask whether deletion by itself will be enough. Perhaps it will reveal a hole that must be filled with other material so the adaptation results in a self-sufficient argument that makes a substantial intervention.

Suppose the writer of the hypothetical dissertation decides to do the comparison-contrast between Hemingway and Faulkner in order to provide mutual illumination. The writer would need to do at least the following: draw on material from the dissertation’s introduction that stakes out the writer’s position in the debates about unreliability, select and refashion material from both the Hemingway and Faulkner chapters to fit the new purposes of the essay, and cut back on the discussions of material not directly related to each author’s use of unreliability. As the writer made these revisions, they would be guided by their purpose of changing conversations about Hemingway’s and Faulkner’s handling of narrative technique.

Voice: Other Scholars’/Yours

What about the dissertation chapter whose contribution to the whole involves a recognizably distinct intervention in a scholarly conversation? Even then, there might be salient differences between the two genres. Journal articles need to let readers know within the first one or two pages what their scholarly intervention is, whereas dissertation chapters often spend many pages laying out what other scholars have said before turning to how they add to that conversation.

Why? Dissertations want you to give equal weight to two sometimes conflicting aims: 1) demonstrating you know the field and 2) making a contribution to it. In demonstrating you know what previous scholars have said (which might also, as an apprentice scholar, feel like paying necessary homage to the leading lights in your field), you are allowed to sideline your own voice for long stretches.

The case is different for journal articles. Even as it’s crucial for you to situate yourself within conversations among other scholars, your voice needs to ring out loud and clear from beginning to end.

In another article , we've recommended thinking of the introduction to a journal article as requiring a “hook and an I”: authors need to provide a scholarly context that allows readers to see how the author’s own intervention advances the field. We cautioned against ignoring one in favor of the other. In adapting a dissertation chapter, you’re more likely to have favored the hook, so you need to emphasize the “I.”

Beyond the introduction, journal articles need you to refer throughout to what other scholars have said concerning different points you make -- you need a hook line -- but you should keep your voice prominent as you play out that line. Strategies include shaping summaries of other scholars’ arguments to highlight your difference from them and using footnotes rather than the body of your essay to bring in work that is related to but not as directly pertinent to your argument. Dissertations allow you to sideline your own voice in other ways. Dissertation chapters often include a myriad of examples. One of us, Faye, has a friend in a history department who told her that she took great pains to include examples from different primary sources to support each claim she made. She carefully chose these examples to demonstrate to her committee members that she had visited many different historical archives, and they were duly impressed.

But journal reviewers of an extracted chapter would be far less impressed. They don’t need you to prove you have done the research. Instead, they need to understand what your argument is and how it offers a substantial answer to the so-what question. If you think of your examples less as a means to underline your argument and more as occasions to advance it, you will be better able to decide how many -- and which ones -- to use.

Scope: For a Chapter/For an Article

Dissertation chapters and journal articles often differ in the scope of their concerns and in the size of the claims they make about their respective arguments. Many dissertations produce their scholarly intervention more at the level of the whole project than at the level of individual chapters. Because chapters are not stand-alone pieces, they can have diverse functions -- some of which have little to do with making a scholarly intervention of the kind found in journal articles. Some chapters can be devoted to providing methodological or theoretical groundwork, others to extending a previous argument by treating more examples that support it. Indeed, when the dissertation makes its intervention through the cumulative weight of the whole, it may not have a single chapter that directly attempts to meet the criteria for journal articles.

Ah, you might think, in that case I’ll just condense my whole dissertation into an article-length piece. But the result is often that no aspect of the article gets sufficient time, leaving reviewers scratching their heads at the leaps in logic and turning up their noses at the inevitably superficial consideration of examples. Your dissertation does more, as a whole, than any journal article, but a single journal article does more than any individual chapter.

We advise a different strategy. Rather than shrink your dissertation to fit, isolate and expand. What are the smaller, original claims you make along the way to making the big one? Maybe you can flesh out one of those claims and clarify its significance by elaborating on the evidence that supports it and bringing in new evidence. Conversely, maybe you have a striking piece of evidence you use in your dissertation that can be analyzed to yield a substantial claim that you hadn’t yet considered.

Your dissertation is not a display case for a single fully formed diamond. It’s a storeroom of gems in various stages of processing, and you are the lapidary.

Fit: For the Dissertation/For the Journal

Finally, although the dissertation gives you the freedom to choose the scholarly conversations you want to respond to, submitting a portion of it to a journal requires finding a match between your choices and the scope of the journal. More often than not, finding that match will involve some adjustment of your chapter.

Suppose the writer of our hypothetical dissertation wanted to submit something to Narrative . Doing so makes good sense because unreliability, a narrative technique that has generated considerable scholarly debate, is a topic of interest to the journal’s readers. But the hypothetical chapter would need to be revised before it would fit with the journal’s mission, which is to publish work that sets up two-way traffic between narrative theory and interpretation.

Consequently, the writer’s submission would need to do more than analyze Hemingway’s uses of unreliability. It would need to link those analyses with one or more issues in the debate about unreliability and indicate how Hemingway’s practice warrants some revisions or extensions of particular positions in the debate, or even perhaps opens up new ways of thinking about unreliability.

We close with a personal anecdote about what we call Genre Conflation Syndrome, the more general condition underlying the assumption that chapters and articles belong to the same genre. Faye vividly remembers the comments an external reader gave her about what she thought was the clever opening of an article she had submitted to a journal. The opening subtly parodied the esoteric, jargon-laden voice of expertise that, in her view, scholars in writing programs often adopted in order to persuade faculty in other disciplines to listen to what they had to say -- a voice she argued in the rest of the article against adopting. The problem was that readers of the article, acting in good faith, put time into struggling to understand this parody, only to find out they needn’t have bothered. The external reader described feeling manipulated and disinclined to trust the author for the rest of the article (which the reader ultimately advised rejecting).

Faye was baffled: it had worked so well as the opening of a talk! She conflated the genres by assuming that talks are just like articles, just shorter and with fewer examples. It was only after Faye thought through the differences in audiences and purposes between talks and articles (e.g., that talks, paradoxically, have more room for an extended display of wit) that she was able to make the adaptations necessary to turn the talk into an article.

We hope our reflections here will enable you to successfully engage in the necessary generic adaptations as you move from chapter to article -- and that such success will inoculate you against any future bouts of Genre Conflation Syndrome.

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