Publishing in a Student Run Journal

[ryan785]

I'm sure this topic is beating a dead horse, but I was wondering how journal articles in student run journals are viewed by PHD programs.

I'm currently in a masters program and would like to publish my undergrad senior thesis in a undergrad student journal that takes submissions from those who have graduated recently. The paper isn't that relevant to my current field, since I switched from a humanities related undergrad to an IT focused grad program (don't even get me started on how that happened)! The paper itself may be related to my future PHD endeavors, so I thought I might as well get it published, but at the same time I know it isn't good enough to be submitted to a more rigorous professional journal.

So after all that extraneous stuff, is submitting to a student run journal worth it/anything?

[TakeruK]

Having been an editor of a student run journal, personally, I would not say it's worth very much. Our journal even had a semi-peer-reviewed process where the editors (mostly undergrad volunteers) would solicit one or two profs to read over and give suggestions. However, most of the time, we are scrambling to get people to submit enough stuff to fill an issue before the deadline. In addition, everyone is a volunteer, so we are all very limited in how much time we were able to spend on the journal. In the end, I would say we relied a lot on the student's supervisor -- most articles would list the supervisor as a co-author -- to help ensure that actual science was being written.

Of course, that could just be one experience (the journal in question is now defunct). I think what one gains the most out of the experience is actually sitting down and writing in a scientific manner. So, I don't think admissions committees would view a publication in such a journal as counting towards one's publication count (especially since I know other student run journals may not even be peer-reviewed). However, what counts is that it demonstrates your experience in taking a large amount of research work (i.e. a thesis) and condensing it into a short, snappy article that allows people outside of your subfield to understand why your work is important. I'm assuming that you are not just simply submitting your thesis to this journal of course -- our articles had a 750 word limit!