Authoring a PhD

something
problem-
atic in your analysis to latch onto. Constructively handled,
these pointers can help you make improvements in your work.
So if the journal comes back with an ‘acceptance subject to
revisions’ letter, you should congratulate yourself on having
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made it past the worst hurdle and not let yourself be put down
by also receiving some criticisms. This kind of letter may seem
tentatively phrased, but it is still an implied contract that if you
do your bit the journal will publish. But you need to close that
contract quickly while it still ‘holds’. Make it a top priority to
meet
all
of the journal’s conditions for acceptance and to return
the paper in fully revised form within a definite short period,
like three months. When you send it back give the editor a brief
covering letter explaining exactly where and how you have met
her requirements for changes to the text. This ‘refresher’ 
guidance will simplify her job in giving you a firm acceptance.
If the journal instead gives you a response saying ‘revise,
resubmit and we will referee the new version’, this often seems
very off-putting. The referees’ comments in this case will be
more serious and entail more changes to meet them, and you
may well feel that even if you do a lot more work the publica-
tion prospects are not assured. But it is still worthwhile doing
what the journal asks and kicking back the paper in fully
revised form. Editors who have requested changes may have
been careful not to commit themselves to publish any revised
piece, but they will become morally obligated to you the more
work you do, and the more you tell them about what you have
done in an accompanying letter. If there are some changes you
really cannot accept or cannot make, use your covering letter to
explain why not, in very cool and dispassionate language. Many
editors will give you the benefit of the doubt here, especially
where you have done everything else that they and the referees
asked for. In addition if the editor can see strong signs that you
have changed things to meet the journal’s previous reserva-
tions, she may send your revised paper out to fewer referees
than with the first draft – perhaps only to the most critical ref-
eree last time. So the success rate for resubmissions is actually
much better than for initial submissions. After receiving a
‘rejection’ letter, therefore, be very careful not to withdraw your
paper in a fit of pique, nor to send it anywhere else, until 
you are crystal clear that the journal concerned is not going to
publish it.
Even if a journal rejects your paper outright, you should still
look carefully at the referees’ comments and try to work out
why it failed. Again discuss these reactions with your supervisor
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and other experienced colleagues. Next make sure that you revise
the paper to prevent the same criticisms recurring elsewhere.
Then pick a journal lower down the professional hierarchy and
submit the revised paper to them.
While you are working on your thesis it is usually a good idea
not to try and start work on any paper which does not derive
from and form part of your thesis. Writing one of the shorter
pieces discussed above may not be too serious a diversion from
your main work. But working on a full paper on a topic differ-
ent from your thesis is definitely to be avoided, because of the
long time lags and concentrated effort entailed, and the poten-
tial for encountering demoralizing rejections or criticisms along
the way. So stick to trying to ‘paperize’ your best and most orig-
inal thesis chapters. It is a good idea to work on a single paper
at a time. But because of the lengthy process, once you have
one paper under submission, it can also be helpful to start
straightaway on another one, so as to get a small ‘production
line’ of papers progressively under way. It is better to have sev-
eral publication efforts at different stages of development at any
one time, as most established academics do, rather than having
a single, lonely effort out there on which all your hopes rest.
The chances are high that one paper, like one lottery ticket,
may not progress.
In addition, many universities now expect research students
with a completed doctorate (or one that is near-finished) to have
at least one or two short pieces published if they are to consider
them for appointment, a trend strongly reinforced in Britain 
by the government’s research assessment exercise (RAE) process.
The RAE effectively requires all academic staff to publish at least
four pieces of research every five or six years, or risk being 
categorized as ‘research inactive’. So departments are very reluc-
tant to appoint anyone who has not shown concrete publish-
ing capability. Similar approaches have been introduced or are
being considered by governments in some other countries. So
having a small portfolio of publications already in place when
you graduate is becoming more important for PhD students
than in previous periods.
New authors are often not aware that there is a very strong
norm against submitting the same paper to more than one jour-
nal at a time. Academic journals are by and large still voluntary
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operations. Referees give their services free, solely out of a sense
of professional commitment or obligation. And most editors
draw only a modest honorarium or get no payment at all. It is
consequently seen as a major abuse of trust to get free advice
and guidance from journals’ referees and editors while sending
out the same paper to different journals at the same time. If edi-
tors find that you have made multiple submissions they will
mostly react by immediately rejecting your paper and possibly
blackballing you for any future consideration of your work.
Academic networks are closer than you might think, and edi-
tors and referees gossip heavily about mistakes like this. If you
make multiple submissions they will quickly be detected and
give you an unfavourable reputation. So this potentially serious
mistake must be scrupulously avoided. If you have a paper
under consideration by one journal which has taken ages con-
sidering it, you still need to notify the editor formally that you
are withdrawing the paper from consideration with them
before sending it on to a different journal.
Some PhD students each year also make mistakes about the
conventions on ‘dual publication’ of material. As soon your
material has been accepted in one academic journal it cannot
be considered, let alone republished, in any other journal. If
you were to succeed in reprinting large amounts of the same
material in a second article then the journal involved would be
breaching the first journal’s copyright. It could perhaps have to
pulp its whole issue. The personal consequences for you would
also be severe. Your reputation within the academic community
would be damaged, since by ‘plagiarizing yourself’ you would
seem to be inflating your curriculum vitae or résumé by under-
hand means. So this is a quick route to professional suicide.
However, it is not only permissible but perfectly acceptable
for you to republish a journal article (usually in a somewhat
revised form) later on in a book. This could be either as a com-
ponent of your whole thesis if you can get this accepted by a
publisher (see below), or as a chapter in an edited book.
Journals take the copyright of any paper which they publish, so
if you want to reuse your article material in your book or in an
edited collection you need to get the journal publisher’s per-
mission to do so, and to include an acknowledgement of where
it first appeared. Journal editors and publishers always give
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authors such permissions to reproduce their own materials
without any copyright fee; for if they did not do so, their sup-
ply of copy would soon dry up. Journals always need to first-
publish material, however. They make their money by getting
original research into print, and their scholarly reputation
would suffer if they seem to be duplicating or reprinting mate-
rial which is already out in book form. The journal could also
run into copyright difficulties if the book version of your paper
by any chance comes out before the journal version, a not
unlikely event given the long time lags in journals publishing,
and one to strictly guard against.
So long as you keep these timings in sync there is no prob-
lem in publishing material in a journal article and then later in
a book. Many of the best organized senior academics regularly
generate one or several articles on different aspects of their cur-
rent research project, each of which ‘trails’ or refers to their
forthcoming book. Then they publish the full connected ver-
sion of the research as a book, varying from six months to a
year or two years later on. This approach delivers repeat mes-
sages to the academic community about the research, and is the
best way of ensuring that the work gets noticed at all. It would
also work for a student finishing her PhD, although it is a very
demanding ‘dissemination strategy’, viable only for the best or
most original doctorates.
Re-working your thesis as a book