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?

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

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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.

Take your time – or get to the point?

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academic publishing, genre, thesis by publication, writing style

By Cally Guerin

I’ve had the opportunity to read lots of interesting papers written by doctoral students and colleagues lately, as well as reviewing journal articles. As I work through the various pieces of writing and line them up against each other, the styles used in different genres are clearly evident. This is especially noticeable when a paper doesn’t quite produce what one would expect of that genre. One of the challenges for any author working across a range of genres is adapting one’s own style to suit the current writing task. In particular, I’ve been noticing a tension between the more leisurely, discursive manner of a thesis, and the brisk pace of the journal article that needs to get to the point much more quickly and efficiently.

Having started my academic life in the world of feminist literary criticism, I find I’m drawn to the style of writing that takes its time to unpack each point of the argument in detail. But I’m torn between that and wanting to get to the main point quickly – like everyone else, I’ve got a lot of other stuff to read too! If the idea can be expressed adequately in 5 words, then why use 15 to make the same point? And too often, it seems that those extra 10 words are padding formed from empty jargon that poses as ‘intellectual’ but doesn’t really say much at all.

I think the ability to write in different genres (thesis, journal article, book chapter) is one of the difficult challenges facing doctoral students, who are expected to understand the differences of genre in quite nuanced ways in order to pitch their work to different audiences and different outlets. I’m very much in favour of the thesis by publication, and advocate that format most of the time. For those who plan to work in universities or in research institutes that require publication in academic journals, there are great benefits in learning how to write articles, and how to negotiate the reviewing and publishing process. Most will only need to write a thesis once, but will need to know how to write articles repeatedly during their research careers.

But just lately I’ve noticed a sneaking feeling forming deep beneath my general conviction that thesis by publication is mostly helpful. I’ve been wondering what might be lost along the way if the traditional thesis format is abandoned. Where else does one have licence to follow through on the fine detail of intellectual thought, to expound at length on a complex theory, or to work through the digressions and tangents that surround the core ideas?

And there are some very good reasons why we don’t always want scholarly work to be constrained by the demands of contemporary publishing practices, of tight word restrictions imposed by journals, or the costs of printing hard copies within the traditions of how many pages the existing machinery can bind together. Not everything can be fitted into such tight spaces; not all writing needs to be quite so dense. Maybe this represents one area in which inexpensive publishing in electronic media becomes so important in disseminating extended excursions into intellectual thought—a few more pages (maybe even quite a few) might not cost much more, but allows for the longer discussion of an idea. This extra space could apply to longer journal articles just as much as to books that otherwise would not find a publication outlet.

Perhaps this all points to the strengths of a PhD thesis format that allows for a combination of published papers and the more conventional framing chapters (sometimes referred to as a ‘thesis with publications’ or ‘hybrid’ – see Jackson 2013; Sharmini et al. 2014). Here the big introductory, context-setting chapter allows for more extensive philosophising on the topic. That’s the place to take up the more leisurely style of careful unpacking of big ideas. But the shorter, neater, more concise representation of the findings can be found in the article-length chapters forming the middle of the thesis.

This preference for different kinds of writing might also mark a tension between scientific and humanities writing. There’s obviously a place for the beautifully crafted sentence in science writing – and certainly, poetry can find a place in science – but it doesn’t always have to take a lot of words to get there!

 

What’s it worth to you? Awarding authorship percentages

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author order, co-authoring, joint authors, thesis by publication

By Cally Guerin

In the process of writing a paper with a group of colleagues recently, I was reminded of the complexities of assigning authorship. In particular, the question came up regarding who had done the most important and/or the most difficult work.

Some felt that the original concept for the research was most important; others claimed that research design was the challenging part; another felt that organizing the data collection and actually collecting some results was key; yet others believed the analysis of that data mattered most; and for others, framing all that empirical data in the relevant literature and locating it in the current debates in the field was what took creative imagination and lots of background reading and preparation.

These issues are pertinent to doctoral candidates writing joint-authored papers in theses by publication. At my university, a statement detailing who did what must be signed by all authors for any co-authored chapters written as journal articles (whether or not those chapters have actually been published yet). This is sometimes fairly straight forward if there are only the supervisor and candidate to be named. In other situations, where to draw the line on who contributed what gets considerably murkier.

There are some guides to working this out. The Australian Code of Conduct for Responsible Research states that:

Attribution of authorship depends to some extent on the discipline, but in all cases, authorship must be based on substantial contributions in a combination of:

• conception and design of the project
• analysis and interpretation of research data
• drafting significant parts of the work or critically revising it so as to contribute to the interpretation.

It is possible to think that this means the three elements listed are of approximately equal importance, though there are plenty who wouldn’t agree.

The Vancouver Protocol makes it clear that legitimate authors must participate in all stages of

• conception and design, or analysis and interpretation of data

AND

• drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content

AND

• final approval of the version to be published.

But these codes and protocols tell us more about who should be included, rather than how big their contribution might be (‘substantial’ is not all that helpful when it comes to disputes over percentages of contribution – everyone might think their work counts as ‘substantial’). It seems that some researchers still place greater value on some elements of the project than others do.

Suzanne Morris has made a very valuable contribution to this discussion. Her tool, Authorder, goes a long way towards working through these more complex questions – although it does require that all authors cooperate in finding agreement on what percentages they are willing to assign to the full range of tasks undertaken in writing a paper. While it is not prescriptive in terms of what tasks to include in the list, nor the percentages that ought to be assigned to each task in the process, Authorder is a wonderful instrument for guiding what can sometimes become a rather difficult discussion.

I love co-authoring papers, and have learnt a huge amount about writing from everyone I’ve written with – how they approach their research, tips on everything from ethics applications to database searches, and the writing processes that they find useful. Part of this learning includes discovering where other authors place the value and importance in their writing.

What are your experiences of co-authoring? When it comes to getting credit for your work, what should you be rewarded for? What takes the most time? What is valued most? Are all parts of the project and writing equally important for getting a paper ready for publication? It would be really helpful to hear more from others about the complexities of this area of doctoral writing.