publication of past university work

[teafortwo971]

Hello all

I just finished my MA and am planning to apply for PhD programs for 2016 Entry (taking a bit of time off to make some money/avoid burnout as I went into the MA right after undergrad). I am hoping to rework some of my past papers for publication in this time as well, however as a graduate, I am no longer affiliated with either of the universities for which I produced the work. So my question is really, is this done? I am not considering my MA thesis yet as won't see the mark for quite some time, but I do have two large undergraduate projects I have been sitting on that I know have some potential (with of course, quite a bit of reworking).

 

Is it okay to try to publish now that I am temporarily out of academia? Do I need to get in touch with the professors/advisors from these past projects (other than for advice)? Do journals refuse works that come from unaffiliated authors? And, furthermore, were I to try to write up something new in my free time, is it possible to see it through to publication or must it have come from a university setting? I have never attempted to publish anything before and I am in the very early stages of this process--I haven't even identified any prospective journals yet--but I'd like to get a head start since I know how important publication is to career prospects in my field (Humanities, English specifically)

 

Thank you! 

 

 

[lewin]

In my field you would definitely need to contact your past advisors because they'd be coauthors on any published work. Even if that's not the norm in your field, they might have useful advice. I might start with, "I'm considering rewriting these and submitting them for publication. Do you think this is feasible? I was thinking about X as an outlet, do you think that's appropriate?" But also, find out what the coauthorship norms are in your subfield.

 

Do journals refuse unaffiliated work? Not officially, but everybody's affected by heuristics and unconscious biases and I'm sure author's affiliation (or lack thereof) could influence how a paper is perceived. So I think you could also list your affiliation as the institution where you completed the work (if you don't have a new institution that seems more appropriate).

[TakeruK]

In my field, this is fairly normal. You would work with your former advisors and in my field, advisors are always coauthors on the paper. I have done this on multiple projects where I left the first school and started a new program. On paper, I became an "external collaborator" at the old school instead of a "student", which also allows me access to important things like journal subscriptions etc. When the work was published, I had two affiliations listed with my name.

[rockhopper]

Hello all,

 

I'm resurrecting this old topic because I was going to start a new topic but my questions may be fairly relevant here.

 

My situation: I'm graduating next week with my M.S. (Whoop!) and I'd like to create a manuscript to send in for publication from my thesis, but my adviser is not going to be of much use to me with this. He is busy with new students/projects and my thesis was outside of his main research area, anyways. 

 

The problem is, I don't have any idea what I'm doing. I've never published before, but I know it would be a shame to not get a publication out of my thesis. I don't want to go into academia but a publication on my C.V. would obviously help my job search prospects. I would like someone to guide me through the process and help me with editing and selecting a journal. I am thinking of a professor who was on my committee, who unfortunately was not the most cooperative guy in the world (read: would not return emails within a months' time, always travelling, often vague with comments until the last minute) but he is known for having many publications and pushing his students to publish. If I worked with him I know I'd get a strong manuscript out of it.

 

Should I approach him and ask him to help me turn the thesis into a manuscript? Any ideas on how to approach him? Does anyone have experience with this situation before? If so, I'd love to hear about them, because I feel like a newbie on the publication scene. 

 

Thanks all! 

[TakeruK]

I would recommend that if you are interested in turning the work into a manuscript, you should meet with the people you want to support you / help you / coauthor the work before you leave your current program. You all need to be on the same page in terms of how much work each of you expect from each other. The work dynamic will be different after you leave, since you will no longer be "their" student (or their program's student). Thus, the only obligations you have to one another in terms of how promptly you reply to email, how much work you put in etc. are completely up to you to decide. 

 

Thus, you really need to pick your coauthors carefully. I would be really worried with the prof that would not return emails within a month etc. But you should talk to them because if they are actually interested in this project then they might work on it more!

 

You should also ask for the profs' honesty when it comes to the viability of turning your thesis into a paper. From my experience (my own and others), there could be a lot more work necessary to go from dissertation quality to article quality. Find out how much more work it would take and whether or not the experienced profs actually think the result would be interesting enough to merit the extra effort of writing it up as a paper. 

 

I guess what I am trying to say here is that you should first make sure your coauthors are on board with your idea to turn this into a publication. Once you talk to them, you should also evaluate if you will have the support and resources necessary for you to finish this work after you graduate. It could be a really long process, especially if you are busy with other work and can only spare a couple hours per week to think about the paper. In the end, you need to decide if it's worth it based on how much work you need to do, how much support you expect to get, and how much time you have to do the work! 

[rockhopper]

Thanks for the genuine advice. I'm currently deciding whether an email or phone call would be most appropriate to reach out to the professor, but he is hard to establish contact with either way. I am hoping that reaching out to him in several ways may show him that I am serious about putting the work in, but as you said, I think the biggest consideration is how much time and effort he is willing to also commit. 

 

If I may ask another question, if the person I have in mind is not willing to move forward with me, where else could I seek assistance? Would it unconventional to ask a professor in a different department to co-author with me when I will no longer be an actual graduate student? My own adviser won't be very much help, as his expertise is in a different area. 

[TakeruK]

Thanks for the genuine advice. I'm currently deciding whether an email or phone call would be most appropriate to reach out to the professor, but he is hard to establish contact with either way. I am hoping that reaching out to him in several ways may show him that I am serious about putting the work in, but as you said, I think the biggest consideration is how much time and effort he is willing to also commit. 

 

If I may ask another question, if the person I have in mind is not willing to move forward with me, where else could I seek assistance? Would it unconventional to ask a professor in a different department to co-author with me when I will no longer be an actual graduate student? My own adviser won't be very much help, as his expertise is in a different area. 

 

Are you still physically at the same school/department? I think it would be best to meet to him about this in person. If it were a prof from my department, I would email them and set up a time to meet, either in their office or over coffee etc. But you would know the best way to arrange a meeting with profs you're more familiar with!

 

I don't think reaching out in multiple ways is necessarily a good thing. You don't want the prof to grudgingly agree to help you only because you kept pestering/bugging them to do so. There's a fine line between persistence and desperation! Again, if he is hard enough to contact now, how much harder would it be when you're not even a student there?

 

This might be a difference in field but the very first person I would ask is my own thesis advisor. In my field, I would absolutely have to include them as a coauthor. Therefore, I must have their support to continue. At the very least, I need their support "in spirit" if not actual guidance. That is, in my field, I would need my advisor's blessing to continue working on this project and turn it into a paper, although I might get most of my guidance and supervision from another professor on the committee. Then the author order would be: Me, Committee Author, Supervisor. 

 

If your advisor refuses to move forward on this work and turn it into a paper,  I would strongly reconsider writing a paper at all. If, after reconsidering, I still think the work is worth writing up, then I would try to approach another professor that knows me and get a second opinion. I would only do this if I strongly believed that my advisor is not acting in my best interests when they say my work isn't worth writing up into a paper. I don't have much experience with a malicious advisor, so I don't really know what to say here, other than to get another professor on your side. So far, I would trust every advisor I ever had and if they said the work is not ready to be a paper, I would trust their judgment.

 

Finally, yes, it is very unconventional to ask a professor in a different department that doesn't know you at all, out of the blue, to coauthor a paper with you that you worked on with another professor. If I was this other professor, I would first ask you why you sought me out and probably talk to your advisor about the work (after all, I would not want to accidentally steal your advisor's work!). I would also be hesitant to take on unsolicited work in this manner because like you said, you would no longer be a graduate student! 

 

Overall, in my opinion, if you do not have the support of your advisor and your committee, I would say it's not worth pursuing this further. But that's based on my experiences in my field.

[rockhopper]

I'll explain the position with my advisor in more detail (thanks for caring enough to keep reading). For clarification, I'll call my advisor "Prof A" and the professor who I would like to work with on this "Prof B". Prof A was my primary advisor for my Master's, and Prof B was on my committee. 

 

I am in Oceanography, and my advisor, Prof A, works with marine mammals and the water column, which originally is what I entered my program to do. Due to the remote location of our fieldwork and logistics in the area, I switched my thesis project to examining fish assemblages after one failed field season where we saw no marine mammals (fish are always there, whales, not so much!). I came up with the idea for the project, independently researched how to collect the data, actually collected the data, pretty much everything involved. It was essentially "Plan B" that turned into my actual project, and my advisor had very little input. 

 

When I originally proposed the idea, my advisor told me to go for it, because I don't believe he actually thought it would work. Well it did, and I was able to collect data over two consecutive years. My advisor doesn't know anything about fish, fish surveys, or associated analyses, but he stayed on as my advisor so he could help me with the oceanography side of the thesis. Prof B is a popular marine biologist who works extensively with fish assemblages, which is why I wanted him on my committee.

 

There is also a large difference in mindset and philosophy between Prof A and Prof B. My advisor, Prof A, is set to retire in the next few years, and has had relatively few of his students publish in the past few years. He is very intelligent, but I think he sits prettily on his tenure and has gotten a bit "lax" over the years. He is also getting older I believe he may be starting to suffer from some memory loss, but that is kind of beyond the point. Prof B is a younger professor who is known to vigorously publish and pushes his graduate students to do the same. He is at the same university system, but at a different campus two hours away from mine. They actually got into a heated debate during my defense over whether publishing should be a priority for students. Prof A argued the "learning experience" is most important part of graduate school, and Prof B seemed irritated that he has not been encouraging me to publish more. 

 

So not only is there a vast different in mindset between the two, but my project is not in my advisor's area of expertise, nor did he really contribute to its creation. Prof B would be substantially more helpful and knowledgeable about actually getting this type of project published, not to mention that he has the appropriate experience with publication. Thus, I believe he is the correct person for moving forward with, and not my advisor. He is not malicious at all, we have a good relationship, and I'm sure would be very encouraging if I told him I wanted to move forward, I just don't think he's the best person for the job. Not having the appropriate experience myself, I know Prof B's expertise and guidance would be pretty crucial. 

[TakeruK]

Well, it sounds like you have a good plan then! It makes more sense now and I definitely would agree with Prof B's philosophy about publishing/grad school! I agree that he is the right person to move forward with too. Again, according to the norms in my field, I would ideally want to move forward with both Prof A and Prof B, with Prof. B being the main advisor and Prof A being included on the basis of being your original advisor (surely he contributed something to your development?). That is, I would ask Prof B to advise me on turning the work into a publication and mostly work with Prof B. in getting the draft complete. We would then send it to Prof A for comments/suggestions at the very end.

 

I hope Prof B agrees to work with you! From your description of Prof B, it does sound like he would want to support you if he has the resources (time mostly) to do so. If he declines, perhaps I would ask him for his honest opinion on the work's viability as a publication. If he thinks it would make a good paper but he just doesn't have time, then I would ask him to suggest other professors that might be interested in working on this! 

 

Good luck! Thanks for providing the additional details; I think it would really help other people in similar situations too!