Writing an article – how is it different from writing a thesis?

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audience, authorial voice, literature review, thesis by publication, writing journal articles

by Cally Guerin

Some doctoral candidates come into their programs with extensive experience of writing for publication from their previous work or study. For most, though, it is a big jump from writing assignments for lecturers or a Masters dissertation to writing a formal article for publication in a high-ranking, peer-reviewed journal. There’s a lot of useful information out there about how to write for academic journals. In this post I want to focus on an aspect of this discussion that is rarely mentioned: how does article writing differ from thesis writing? Importantly, how can doctoral writers recognise and respond to the difference?

Writing a thesis by publication. Some reasons for and against

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article-based thesis, collection of articles, compilation thesis, thesis by publication

By Kalypso Filippou

Kalypso Filippou is a post-doctoral researcher and part-time teacher at the Faculty of Education, University of Turku in Finland. Kalypso’s research interests mainly focus in the field of higher education, international education, and intercultural postgraduate thesis supervision.

I have recently defended my article-based thesis (aka thesis by publication, collection of articles thesis) and I was intrigued by the blog of Cally Guerin regarding the ongoing debate of writing a thesis by publication (https://doctoralwriting.wordpress.com/2019/03/18/thinking-about-writing-a-thesis-by-publication-some-reasons-for-and-against/#more-2348). I actually agree with all the reasons for and against that were indicated but I decided to re-examine these advantages and disadvantages and add a few more reasons based on my experiences as a doctoral candidate who wrote a thesis by publication.

Deciding on a dissertation format: Considering the implications of a PhD by publication

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publishing, research writing, thesis by publication

By Liezel Frick (Stellenbosch University, South Africa)

Professor Liezel Frick is a colleague in the Special Interest Group that focuses on doctoral writing. She has long considered the dimensionality of the candidate and their text and adds South African experience to our generally Australasian perspectives.

Unlike the traditional monograph style of thesis (a collection of sequential chapters, each reporting on a specific aspect of the project in a linear fashion), a publication-based format has greater variation in form. For example, it may consist of an introductory and conclusive chapter that explain the logic of the dissertation, and a number of publishable and/or published works that may include articles, book chapters and/or published conference proceedings (see Mason and Merga, 2018 for a multitude of options this format might take on), or a hybrid of the above-mentioned formats (see Odendaal and Frick, 2016 for a conceptual frame on this hybridity).

Often students do not have (or feel they have) control over deciding on the format of their doctoral dissertation – institutional policies, disciplinary practices, and supervisor preferences may govern their decisions. The publication-based doctorate is gaining more impetus internationally and across disciplines, yet both students and supervisors are increasingly being confronted by this choice without having the necessary pedagogical knowledge or tools to make an informed decision.

In addition, the forces that drive the push to publish have not always originated from the noble intention of developing PhD students into responsible scholars. Adherence to quality assurance mechanisms and addressing slow and low completion rates at the PhD level underlie many managerialist policies and practices. However, what is often not explicit in these debates is whose interests are primarily served by publishing during the PhD – institutional stature and ranking, the supervisors’ academic credentials, or the scholarly development of the student?

Writing conference presentations: think about the audience

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oral presentations, speaking at conferences

By Cally Guerin

I’ve been fortunate to attend several Higher Education conferences lately and have been thinking about the research writing in the papers I’ve listened to. There have been a broad range of presentation styles, giving me contact with norms outside my usual disciplinary connections. Most of the presentations have been fabulously stimulating, and it has been wonderful to spend time with people who are passionate about their research, socially engaged and working to make the world a better place. I have also been reminded of just how important it is to think about communicating with the live audience in the room.

Thinking about writing a thesis by publication? Some reasons for and against

Tags

article-based thesis, compilation thesis, thesis by publication

By Cally Guerin

 While the thesis by publication is very common in some disciplines and in some national doctoral systems, debate continues to rage about this model. On the whole, I’m in favour of the article-based/compilation format reporting on research done during candidature, but with some important caveats. Here I outline some reasons for and against presenting doctoral work as a series of publications.

Writing text for research posters

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academic posters, visual communication

By Cally Guerin

Recently I sat down to make a poster about the DoctoralWritingSIG blog for a higher education conference. I’ve made only a few research posters over the years; this genre is more common in some science disciplines than it is in humanities and social sciences. The exercise encouraged me to think about how this kind of research writing differs from that of a journal article or a thesis or, for that matter, a 20-minute oral presentation for a conference.

Poster prose is a little like reducing an 80,000-word thesis to a Three-Minute Thesis presentation: turning an article-length idea into a poster requires the author to focus in on the key messages of the communication. Posters encourage writers to extract the skeleton of the narrative they have developed in more fulsome terms elsewhere, to distill the key ideas of the work into neat dot points or short statements. This is not a time to be chatty; a poster gives us only the central message.