What to Do With Your Dissertation After You Defend
Congratulations, new graduate of a PhD program: you’ve completed your dissertation, successfully defended it, and have celebrated your success. Now what? Many academics find their minds go blank when you ask them that question. Others know exactly what they need to do: publish. But they do not know how to transform the bulk of a dissertation into something others beyond the dissertation committee will want to read. And the academic’s long-term career goals also shape what comes next after the dissertation. The problem is, most people in this position are never given much guidance on how to move from PhD candidate to a person with an earned doctorate and an open publishing field in front of them.
Graduate programs often do not explain much about what to expect of or to do with your dissertation after graduation (Germano, 2013, p. 1). Worse, the time you spent honing your writing skills for the dissertation may not have prepared you for the writing skills that come with academic publishing. Academic publishing offers several options for transforming your dissertation into a publication or several after graduation, and knowing which of these to choose from can create anxiety in some new PhD graduates, especially if the “publish or perish” ethos is driving the decision-making. Having a publication strategy after graduation for how to convert your dissertation into more publications, as well as expand on and continue your research, allows new academic writers to forge a path forward based on their own unique goals.
A custom publication strategy allows you to know whether you should convert your dissertation into an article or several, or a monograph (book) (Germano, 2013, p. 6), or into a conference presentation, a workshop, a chapter in an edited book, or even an academic course. Your dissertation can be one publication after you defend it and graduate, or it can be several. The choice depends on your specific field, its expectations and job market, and your goals for your academic career. The odds of being successful increase when you create a multi-tiered plan for moving your scholarship from the dissertation format it is in when you graduate to a polished, published piece afterward.
Sometimes, the fear of the odds being stacked against a single academic trying to publish articles and books from their research is understandable. You are competing with many other recent graduates and some not-so-recent; you are likely juggling multiple demands on your time and mental energy. Germano (2013) stated, “If you have written an outstanding doctoral thesis, chances are still very good that at least one publisher would like to talk to you about it” (p. 7). “Outstanding” does not mean perfect or excellently written; what Germano was talking about is the topic of your dissertation itself. Knowing how your topic fills a specific gap in your field, how it is applicable to practice, and why it is meaningful is the core of what you are aiming to write about when you publish. So the first bit of advice for this blog post is to ask you: what was meaningful about your dissertation research? How did it impact your field, help a group of stakeholders, or change something about our understanding? With the answer to that question, you can move into re-creating your dissertation in a form appropriate to the publication you are aiming at to accept and publish your work.
Re-create, don’t revise
Notice I used the word “re-create” rather than “revise.” Revision is a process where a piece of existing writing is reworked, retooled, and sometimes rewritten. A critical thing to know about converting your dissertation into a publication is that you are not revising your dissertation and submitting it in its current form to a new set of judges like your committee. Instead, you are creating something entirely new: a monograph, a chapter for a multi-author book, a presentation, a workshop, a journal article, and so on. Especially in cases of journal articles, the work is to move from the huge volume of the dissertation down into a fraction of it: usually about 200 pages distilled down into a new piece that is only 30 pages. Germano (2013) frames this as “getting to more”: more clarity in the writing, a more clearly defined purpose in the structure, and more potential readers (p. 11).
Publications born of your dissertation need to be more thoughtful, purposeful, and crafted for an audience that extends well beyond the typical three-member dissertation committee. The dissertation transforms from a document meant for that audience into one meant for a new, wider, and sometimes more critical audience (journal editors and peer reviewers are not as invested in you or your research as your dissertation committee was). A quick thought experiment: close your eyes and imagine seeing your dissertation in a published form. Who is the audience for that piece, and what does it have to do to help them understand your study? For example, one client of mine submitted a journal article to a publication whose chief editor was a major theorist in the client’s field. Knowing that allowed the client to tailor their article specifically to the journal’s audience, and it shaped both the new literature review (a dissertation’s literature review needs to be updated because the field has changed since you wrote it) and the discussion section, for the same reason.
Try this: ten minutes with your table of contents
Germano’s three “mores” make a good first check on any dissertation, and you can run it in ten minutes. Open your table of contents and leave the dissertation itself closed. If you open it, you will start reading, and if you start reading, you will start fixing, which is exactly the instinct we are working against. For each chapter, or each major section of your findings, write one line in answer to each of these three questions.
- Clarity. Can I say what this chapter found in two sentences?
- Purpose. What would it be on its own? An article, a talk, a book chapter, a workshop?
- Readers. Who besides my committee needs it?
Some lines will stay blank, and that is information too. The chapters where all three answers come quickly are where your first publication is likely to be. Do not decide anything yet. This is a first look at what you have, which is where Germano (2013) says to begin: by taking stock of what the dissertation is and what it might become (p. 6).
This post is the first in a series built from my reading on publishing from a dissertation. Each post takes a question a new PhD might ask, says what the books on my desk say about it and where I agree or differ, and gives you one thing to try. In the next post, I’ll go through the things a dissertation can become, one at a time.
If you want company for the next step, that is what my Dissertation to Publication coaching is for.
Warmly,
~Jennifer
Reference
Germano, W. (2013). From dissertation to book (2nd ed.). University of Chicago Press.