Strategies for Writing a Thesis by Publication in the Social Sciences and Humanities

Lynn P. Nygaard, Kristin Solli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429537264
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Responding to the growing popularity of the thesis by publication within doctoral education, this book offers practical advice and critical discussion of some of the central choices and challenges that PhD students considering dissertation options face.

Drawing on current research and informed by extensive experience of working with and running workshops for PhD candidates who write article-based dissertations, this book gives readers an idea of what writing a thesis by publication entails – what its purpose is, what the various expectations might be for this emerging genre, and what the challenges might be in writing one. Particular emphasis is put on how to put the individual articles together to create a coherent thesis that clarifies the student's individual original contribution. Written primarily for students, Strategies for Writing a Thesis by Publication in the Social Sciences and Humanities covers key topics such as:

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• how the genre has developed, with an emphasis on the role of the narrative (introductory text) that accompanies the articles

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• typical rhetorical challenges that writers of such dissertations face

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• strategies for handling the writing process

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• specific challenges of demonstrating doctorateness in the thesis by publication and strategies for addressing them

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• institutional variations that the thesis writer should seek clarification on as early as possible

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• structural elements of the narrative and their main functions

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• the range of choices that can be made throughout the doctoral journey and thesis writing.

This book is a must-read for PhD candidates and supervisors new to the genre, as well as those involved in directing PhD programmes who are interested in the pedagogical implications of the move towards article-based dissertations.

The 'Insider Guides to Success in Academia' offers support and practical advice to doctoral students and early-career researchers. Covering the topics that really matter, but which often get overlooked, this indispensable series provides practical and realistic guidance to address many of the needs and challenges of trying to operate, and remain, in academia.

These neat pocket guides fill specific and significant gaps in current literature. Each book offers insider perspectives on the often implicit rules of the game -- the things you need to know but usually aren't told by institutional postgraduate support, researcher development units, or supervisors -- and will address a practical topic that is key to career progression. They are essential reading for doctoral students, early-career researchers, supervisors, mentors, or anyone looking to launch or maintain their career in academia.

1 Introduction

The doctorate in pieces

As a doctoral candidate, you know that you need to produce a thesis. You know that this thesis will be evaluated, and the outcome of this evaluation will be what allows you to call yourself a doctor or not. Doctoral candidates talk constantly about writing the thesis; social media is rife with humour about the thesis; and even family and friends who might never have gone to graduate school understand that writing a thesis is what doctoral students do. But few seem to be aware that a thesis is not the same thing for every kind of doctoral student.

When most of us think about a ‘thesis’, we picture a tome – a breathtaking number of pages filled with knowledge so specialized that perhaps only five other people in the world might be qualified to read it. But a thesis by publication is different. It comprises academic publications¹ that are meant to be interesting to more people than just your supervisor. They are stand-alone pieces that somehow have to come together as a whole. But how exactly does that happen? And why would students choose to write this kind of thesis rather than a traditional booklike thesis?

The purpose of this book is to give you an idea of what writing a thesis by publication entails: what its purpose is, what the various expectations might be for this emerging genre, and what the challenges might be in writing one. Rather than focusing on how to write the individual articles, however, our focus is on putting together the thesis as a whole: how to think of the articles as individual pieces in a larger picture, and how to write the narrative as an argument for how it all comes together to form a doctorate. We have chosen this focus because while books on how to write journal articles abound (e.g. see Belcher, 2009; Curry & Lillis, 2013; Murray, 2013; Nygaard, 2015; Thomson & Kamler, 2013), almost nothing is written on how these articles can constitute a doctoral thesis in the social sciences and humanities.² And writing this kind of thesis is not simply a matter of thinking about the thesis as a monograph consisting of articles. It is a different animal altogether.

We focus our discussion on the social sciences and humanities, where the monograph still dominates and the thesis by publication is an ‘emerging genre’ that has not yet found its form. One reason the genre is unsettled in the social sciences and humanities is that these disciplines work differently than disciplines in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields and medicine, where the thesis by publication is more firmly established. In STEM fields and medicine, students often work in lab settings or in teams with their supervisor as a project leader; they produce articles co-authored with others, including their supervisor; and there is often a very tight relationship between one article and the next (with one building on the other in a logical sequence). In the social sciences and humanities, however, students work more independently, do not co-author as much with their supervisors (or perhaps even at all), and the articles might be less ‘sequential’ in nature. This means that what works well in the natural sciences and technical fields does not always transfer smoothly to our context when it comes to both the elements that constitute the thesis and how the thesis is evaluated.

Moreover, different institutional settings – even within the same discipline – have developed different ways of adapting this format. As a result, there are fewer shared conventions for the thesis by publication in the social sciences and humanities. Indeed, what might be expected of a political scientist at the University of Oslo might be completely different than what might be expected of a historian at the University of Sydney, even though both are producing what we would call a ‘thesis by publication’ in the social sciences and humanities. This book is intended to help you navigate this confusing terrain, if not by providing answers then at least by suggesting how you might think through the dilemmas you face.

What exactly is a ‘thesis by publication’?

As evidence of the unsettled nature of this genre, one need only observe the lack of consensus on what to call it. Some of the names we have come across include the following:

• PhD by publication
• article-based thesis
• compilation thesis
• alternative format thesis
• manuscript dissertation
• multiple-paper option, and
• essay format.

What all these terms have in common is that they refer to doctoral theses³ that are not monographs, but rather consist of a number of articles or papers aimed for publication and an accompanying narrative text that explains how the papers or articles together form a larger coherent project. In this book, we have chosen to use the term ‘thesis by publication’ mainly because it seems to be the most prevalent term in the research literature, as well as being recognizable across geographical locations, institutions, and disciplines.

We also chose this term because it foregrounds the publication aspect of this format, which is what sets this type of thesis apart from the monograph, as well as being the characteristic that is foregrounded in many of the discussions surrounding its proclaimed benefits and problems. What we mean by ‘publication’ is a paper aimed at an academic audience and intended for publication in an academic journal or by an academic press. This is an important distinction to make because there are many alternatives to a monograph format that are made up of more than one deliverable. For example, a professional doctorate programme might require three essays, a report, and then a short thesis that includes a reflective statement. We would not consider this a thesis by publication because the individual pieces are not intended for publication. Likewise, doctoral dissertations that comprise creative fiction, poetry, fine art, or architectural designs also comprise deliverables that are not considered academic publications. While these alternative formats may have many things in common with a thesis by publication, they are not included specifically in our discussion because they are a different enterprise than the kind of thesis by publication that is the focus of this book.

The term ‘thesis by publication’ can cover both a prospective and retrospective thesis. A prospective thesis by publication is intended as a PhD project from the outset: the candidate is accepted into a doctoral programme, is assigned a supervisor, and writes the articles with the intention of having them evaluated as part of a doctoral degree. In contrast, a retrospective thesis allows the candidate to compile a number of papers that they have published over the years from multiple research projects that might not originally have been intended to constitute a body of work that would be evaluated for the purpose of a doctoral degree. Although becoming less and less common, the retrospective thesis nonetheless remains an option in some university contexts. This is especially the case in the professional fields where individuals who have been teaching and conducting research in higher education without a PhD are awarded a PhD degree by submitting a certain number of published texts without going through a formal PhD programme. The prospective thesis is increasingly becoming the only type of thesis by publication that is accepted at most universities and is thus the focus of this book.

Putting the pieces together: the narrative

A thesis by publication differs from a monograph because it is made of several pieces – individual publications that are written as stand-alone works – that are put together into a whole. But putting them together into a whole means more than stapling them together with a cover letter saying, ‘Here are my articles. Hope you like them! Looking forward to being a doctor ☺’. A key component of the thesis by publication is also the narrative text that explains how your individual articles together constitute a doctoral project, and why you should be considered worthy of a doctoral degree. Because the individual publications you have written are meant to report on research to a scholarly community, you need a separate kind of text – one aimed at your evaluation committee – that can provide an argument for how these pieces come together to form a whole, and demonstrate how this ‘whole’ should be considered the culmination of a successful doctoral journey.

The expectations for this narrative, however, vary widely. If the degree of inconsistency in nomenclature can be interpreted as reflecting the ‘unsettledness’ of this genre, we can safely conclude that the most unsettled aspect of the thesis by publication is the narrative (see text box on naming the narrative). The wide variety of names for this text that accompanies the articles suggests that no one can quite agree on precisely what this text should do: Should it be seen as a lengthy literature review? A more overarching analysis of the findings across the articles? A critical, behind-the-scenes description of what went into designing and conducting the research?

Naming the narrative

Perhaps nothing is more indicative of the unsettled nature of this genre than the wide range of names for the narrative text that accompanies and explains the articles. Here are just some of the ones we found:

• analysis
• capstone
• chapeau paper
• commentary
• critical essay
• critique
• doctoral statement
• exegesis
• extended introduction
• general introduction
• meta-text
• narrative
• overarching text
• report
• review appraisal
• summary
• supporting statement
• synopsis
• synthesis, and
• thesis text.

And in Scandinavia, where we are based, it is called the kappe (or kappa), which means ‘mantle’ or ‘cloak’, because it ‘adorns, embellishes, and protects a body (of articles)’ (Munthe, 2019, p. 12).

In this book, we have landed on using the term ‘narrative’ to describe the text(s) that accompany the articles because whether this text summarizes, critiques, or analyses the publications, it ultimately represents the doctoral student writing about the articles, the research that took place behind them, and the relationship between the articles and the overarching project. The word ‘narrative’ implies some kind of storytelling, and in the narrative that accompanies the individual articles the doctoral candidate tells the story of how the pieces come together as a whole. As with any other kind of narration, the author actively draws the reader’s attention to where they want it – whether it be on the literature that positions the doctoral work in a larger conversation, the implications of the main arguments in the articles, or any other aspect of the research the author wants to highlight. We use the term ‘narrative’, then, not in the sense of various versions of narrative theory found in literature, psychology, or other fields, but rather in the sense of constructing a meaningful story, in a logical sequence, that constitutes an argument for how the thesis comes together as a cohesive doctoral project.

The word ‘narrative’ also implies a narrator, a single person telling the story. Importantly, the narrative is something that you as a doctoral candidate write as a solo author. Many students include co-authored works as their articles; thus, the narrative might be the only opportunity you have to write in your own voice and demonstrate who you are as an individual researcher. This is crucial because the function of this narrative is to ‘demonstrate doctorateness’ – that is, to demonstrate that you possess all the necessary qualities that a doctoral candidate needs to successfully be granted the title of ‘doctor’ (see Chapter 4).

In sum, we find the term ‘narrative’ useful because it draws attention to how this part of your thesis narrates the other texts. We also prefer the word ‘narrative’ to many of the other alternatives because it can work equally well for both of the two main structural formats of the thesis by publication: the two-part model and the sandwich model (Mason & Merga, 2018). These models are explained in more detail in Chapter 5, but essentially the two-part model comprises an introductory body of text (often consisting of several different chapters) followed by the articles, where there is a clear separation between the narrative and the publications. In the sandwich model, a greater attempt is made to not only integrate the narrative and the publications, but also to connect the publications with one another. The publications appear as separate chapters sandwiched between at least two main bodies of text (an introduction and conclusion), and narrative text may also appear between the chapters to aid the transition from one to the next. Thus, using a term such as ‘general introduction’, for example, would not accurately capture the function or position of the narrative in the sandwich model. ‘Narrative’, on the other hand, works well for either one coherent body of text that precedes the articles, or text that is positioned before, after, and perhaps between the articles.

Is the thesis by publication for everyone?

Although we note that the thesis by publication is becoming increasingly common in the social sciences and humanities, by writing this book we by no means intend to imply that we think this format should be embraced unquestioningly by everyone. Nor are we suggesting that it should be resisted at all costs. What we hope to get across is that this format is emerging for a variety of reasons (for a discussion on this, see Chapter 2), but that because doctoral programmes are different, and doctoral candidates have different reasons for embarking on a doctoral journey, it may not suit everyone equally well. The focus on publications means that the thesis by publication is particularly well suited for doctoral students who are aiming for an academic career, especially with an emphasis on conducting research. But the piecemeal nature of the publications may not work well for doctoral projects that are difficult to divide into meaningful chunks, even if the candidate aspires to a career in research. For example, doctoral students using ethnographic approaches might find it difficult to include enough thick description in an article format.

Moreover, doctoral candidates who are not aspiring to a career in academic research may find the thesis by publication unsuitable for other reasons. Doctoral students in the professions (such as education, social work, or healthcare) might find that the focus on academic research detracts from their focus on professional development (and the thesis by publication might not even be an option for the professional doctorate programmes in many universities). The focus on academic output at the expense of focusing on concerns relevant to the profession or work life might al...