Most frequently, we assist recent graduates of doctoral programs who are seeking to take the next step in their academic careers and publish their approved dissertation research. This support takes two main forms: developing a publication plan and manuscript revision. Of course, we quite often work work with researchers who are conducting new research, and can provide comprehensive support throughout the academic research process, including topic development, literature review assistance, methodological specification, data analysis, and interpretation.
Publication Plan
Our process to develop your publication plan consists of three steps:
- In-depth analysis of your dissertation: In this step, we’ll first identify threads that run through the different parts of your dissertation, particularly the problem statement, research questions and hypotheses, literature review, methodology, data analysis, results, and discussion. In so doing, we will group information by theme to determine how many cohesive “wholes” we can compose from the single, larger “whole” of your dissertation.
- Identification of sources: Here, we’ll take the many cohesive “wholes” that we compose through the analysis of your dissertation and use them to survey and develop a list of sources where your work may be able to be published. We’ll also take into account your goals for the possible future direction of your research and any “big name” journals you’d like to explore as a potential home for your work. This will allow us to determine a “short list” of perhaps two or three prospective publications to target with the results of our work from step one.
- Rhetorical analysis of exemplar articles: In this final step, we’ll examine the archives of each publication to identify articles that resemble yours in terms of topic and methodological approach. In addition, we’ll identify a number of articles from more recent volumes and issues that are representative of the work the journals and magazines publish today. After identifying those articles, we conduct a thorough rhetorical analysis of each, making determinations about purpose and audience, which will allow us to determine such things as how to “get in” to your dissertation research in article format, what knowledge can be assumed to be known by the reader, and what must be explained (and exactly how much and in what ways).
Manuscript Revision
For clients with a publication plan or target journal already in mind, we can assist with shaping your dissertation into an actual manuscript for submission.
- Identifying journal aims: Once you’ve settled on a specific journal, we can take it from there, using the journal’s online submission criteria as a guide for our work to develop your manuscript.
- Revising for specific journal criteria: Shaping the manuscript to comply on all points invariably requires trimming dissertation writing extensively. For context: it’s common for journals to have word count limits of 3,500 to 15,000–while most dissertations are 50,000 to 100,000 words or more!
- Highlight key sections of the dissertation research: The extensive trimming and editing required also necessitate identifying the essential segments of your work in areas like the literature review and methods that tend to run very long in dissertations, and then presenting this key information much more concisely to fit the journal’s requirements.
- Emphasizing current and relevant scholarship: Finally, trimming and focusing the study requires selection of only the most recent and pertinent sources for inclusion, which then requires extensive reworking of the references list to match the sources cited in the manuscript.
