Authoring a PhD

participate in nominating examiners, or to be able to handle a
general professional conversation well in an oral exam, or to
choose useful (‘sales pitch’) words for your thesis title, you can-
not switch on these capabilities overnight, or even in your last
year. You need to get out into your discipline’s conference cir-
cuit at least two or three years ahead of time – so that you know
the personalities of possible examiners, and have a good sense
of where the profession has been so far and is going now.
Planning ahead for a smooth end-game is something you
always need to keep an eye on. The comforting thing is that
these efforts at professional orientation will also be of benefit to
you beyond the submission and examination process.
A doctorate is more than just a pile of words, or a smartly
bound thesis with your name on the front in gold letters. It is a
process of change, and the crystallization of a substantial slice
of your intellectual life. So ending a doctorate is not as simple
as just completing the mandatory submission and examination
stages. These mark the bureaucratically defined terminus of
your apprenticeship. But they do not in themselves give mean-
ing to three or four years of intense effort. For a more lasting
way of getting your research acknowledged, you need to get it
published and into print, to which I turn in the next chapter.
2 2 6
◆
A U T H O R I N G A P H D

---

227
Publishing Your Research
What good is a good idea if no one ever hears it?
AT & T advert
1
P
ublishing your work is the key way in which you can insert
it into the slipstream of academic ideas, and so avoid your
thesis becoming just ‘shelf-bending’ research, sitting in your
university library and slowly bending a shelf over the years. The
main route is to submit papers to professional journals. More
rarely you can reshape your whole thesis into book form and
get it accepted by a publisher as a monograph. Neither form of
publication is quick or straightforward. They can protract 
your end-game long past the formal date at which your title
metamorphoses into Dr.
Writing and submitting journal papers
How odd it is that anyone should not see that all
observation must be for or against some view if it
is to be of any service.
Charles Darwin
2
A journal paper is an apparently simple-looking artefact, but it
is not shaped just by the author. The professional community
as a whole influences what is published, by fixing the norms
and conventions of learned journals. And the editors and 
referees of a journal normally set specific conditions for each
article. To be effective in publishing papers you need first to
9

---

understand the journals market in your discipline and form a
clear idea of what gets published in the discipline’s journals,
and what does not. Only then can you begin to effectively tar-
get an appropriate journal and to get your material accepted
and into print.
Understanding the journals market
Academics arrange orthodox print journals into a rough hierar-
chy of excellent, above average, average, below average, and
marginal journals. There are four major influences on journals’
long-run reputations: their methods of refereeing; their citation
scores; the journal’s type and its circulation (which are closely
interrelated); and the overall time lag from first submitting a
paper through to its eventual publication.