DISERTATION HELP

The dissertation topic or thesis usually is a graduate-educated professional's first intensive experience in academic writing. But it is not a representative experience. For the most part, academic writing is quite unlike writing your dissertation. While many graduates are encouraged by their dissertation committees to publish their work, the distractions and challenges that arise in fellowships or professional employment typically prevent graduates from doing so. Apart from the impediments of new work responsibilities, the challenge of transforming a dissertation of hundreds of pages to a journal manuscript of two or three dozen can feel insurmountable. There are doubtless tens of thousands of valuable scientific endeavors recorded in nicely bound but rarely opened dissertation books tucked away on university shelves. Their terse mention in Dissertation Abstracts International is unlikely to lead to wider scientific exposure, in most cases. It may seem a Herculean task to pare down a dissertation to the size of a journal manuscript. But that is exactly what must be done if the wider scientific community is to benefit from the fine work that doctoral students often produce.

The previous sentence is an important one. The first step in manuscript preparation is believing that you have something of value to write about. Too often, young professionals underestimate the value of their research and other scholarly endeavors, including innovative or insightful clinical practice. Almost any thoughtfully considered foray into research or unique clinical experience is a story others would want to know about. Virtually any new thought, new approach, or new perspective in a professional field is publishable, whether it emerged via a formal research study, term paper, speech, case presentation, or experience alone. Seasoned academics may have scores of publications, but each one is not a “tour de force” nor the work equivalent of a dissertation. Career academics learn to value the many varied products of their minds, small and large, singular or collaborative, and they strive to publish anything that might be of interest or value to their varied audiences.

It is highly unlikely that a doctoral dissertation has so little scholarly value that professionals in that field of study would not be interested in reading about it in some published form. The dissertation committee's guidance and endorsement virtually assure that. The challenge is how to take the behemoth of the dissertation and transform it into a svelte, pithy, and publishable manuscript. This is not simply a matter of removing enough content to meet the page limits of a given journal. The entire organization and thrust of the manuscript must be reconceptualized.

The goals and objectives of a dissertation are quite different from the goals and objectives of a journal article. Dissertations are like memoirs – they contain a great deal of “process” information in addition to the research “content.” The process information allows the dissertation committee to see all the roads one investigated when selecting and defining the research problem, all the plans one considered before selecting the final methodology, and many other details that would be considered extraneous in a journal article. Dissertations are lengthy for the same reason that legal trials often are lengthy – the writer is providing reams of evidence, i.e., meticulously building a case to back up the ultimate conclusions that are offered. Such laborious justification regarding what was or was not done, or considered, in a research project – leaving no conceptual stone unturned – is not expected nor appropriate to journal manuscripts.

A journal's peer review process allows published manuscripts to function more like magazine articles. Journal reviewers do not need or want the heavy process-focused information that dissertation committees do. The journal's editors would not even distribute a manuscript for review if they did not think that the topic was a relevant one or if a cursory review of the document did not pass muster. In a sense, there is a degree of trust given the contributing author that precludes the heavy “burden of proof” requirements surrounding dissertation writing. Journal reviewers want to see that one is knowledgeable (but briefly so) about the existing literature in the topic area, that the methods are reasonable (and replicable if someone desires to try) and that the results support the conclusions. They also want to see that a manuscript offers a contribution to the field, although this contribution can be (and typically is) very small. Accomplishing these writing objectives requires far less space than meeting the process objectives of a dissertation. The journal's readership in turn presumes that others already have subjected the manuscript to a reasonable degree of scientific scrutiny and, in that regard, readers are free to consume journal articles with an even less jaundiced eye toward the author's burden of proof. Accordingly, the author's communication task in preparing a journal article is much more straightforward than when preparing a dissertation.

Most of the remainder of this article describes a unique, structured approach for determining what dissertation content (or other material one is starting from, including one's ideas alone) is or is not appropriate to a journal article, and explains how to organize the resulting content in a way that is likely to yield a publication-worthy manuscript. First, however, a method for selecting the most appropriate journal – the publication target – is described. While it is possible to write a manuscript first and then to seek an appropriate publication outlet, it is preferable to select the targeted publication beforehand, because the style and parameters of the chosen publication should guide the approach to writing.

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