Submitting an unpublished master's thesis to journals

[jortin10]

I graduated this past spring and wrote a master's thesis for my capstone. It had four questions and I was thinking of writing 2 seperate articles for publication by combining the first two questions and the last two questions. Has anyone submitted their thesis or dissertation to a journal for publication? Also, how descriptive is the methodology section suppose to be (considering that my thesis was 72 pages in written length)? In addition, what advice would you give to shorten a 23 page lit. review to fit the article's maximum 30 pages?

Thank you

[Joel418]

I did extract a single subject from my thesis for publication (successfully, hooray!), and the best advice I can give you is:

1. Find the appropriate venue for your material, and don't hesitate to tailor the material to target a specific journal's audience (I modified my subject, which was focused on pure historical research, to appeal to music conductors as it was a journal that most commonly publishes historical research for the purpose of performance preparation).

2. Follow the stylebook! Find it, adopt your material to it, and only then, submit it. You cannot send a clearer signal that you are sending out a "mass mailing" with no particular interest in their periodical than to send a work that is completely unmodified from its original form.

Best of luck

Joel

[natsteel]

In History, it is rare to see more than a few hundred words on either methodology or historiography (our lit review) in journal articles.

You're best bet is to:

1) keep in mind that a journal article is a very different thing from a thesis and

2) read other articles in your field's top journals and note their structure.

Sometimes I will create a very basic outline of an article while reading it. For especially dense articles, it can help to visualize the structure. In your case, you could see how articles are commonly structured (and how much space is given over to each part of the structure) and try to structure your article accordingly.

Edited August 6, 2011 by natsteel

[runonsentence]

The way I see it, you're not so much "trimming down" as recasting your thesis into a new genre. Your purpose and audience are going to change: instead of demonstrating your knowledge and research for a committee, you're making an argument that fits into a larger conversation for the academics reading the journal. What kind of argument feels doable to make and adequately back up? If addressing two of your thesis questions still gives you an overly long lit review that you just can't figure out how to trim down, then maybe address one question. Keep in mind that most journal articles tend to have very brief lit reviews.

Choose a journal and, as natsteel suggests, note how articles are generally structured in the journal—you can outline, annotate, reflect, whatever it takes for you to pay attention to how the authors have put their writing together. Tailoring your article to a journal in this way is a must: editors expect you to know your audience, that is know their journal and the kinds of articles they like to publish.