140 12 Beyond the Thesis
could not be included in a thesis; happily, I believe this rule is now more or less
extinct, although some supervisors would argue that it was a good thing.
Academic seminars, though less formal than journals or conferences, are a vital
component of academic communication. Most PhD students are encouraged or re-
quired to give seminars in their departments during their studies. I think it is even
more important to take the opportunity to give seminars elsewhere, in other univer-
sities in your city or places you visit when travelling. I cannot count how often I’ve
heard that a student’s work was influenced by comments they got from a group of
academics they met while visiting another university. If you make regular presenta-
tions, you are likely to sharpen your critical thinking; and the scrutiny your work
has undergone in a presentation, both from yourself and from your audience, will
bear fruit in your writing. Of course, you need to present to a professional standard,
and with confidence.
Some people write books, but this is more typically an activity of an experienced
researcher. There is a view in many disciplines that a book should be primarily the
product of mature, balanced reflection, not just an opportunity to advance a single
point of view. Some PhD students do publish their thesis as a monograph, though, and
if you have such an opportunity you should certainly consider taking advantage of it.
A personal perspective: there is no doubt that a long publication list is impres-
sive, even more so when the author is relatively junior. It would be dishonest of me
to say that it is clearly in your best interests, some of the time, to publish less rather
than more: appointment boards will always be influenced by an appearance of high
productivity, and may not really trouble to look at the quality of the publications,
especially for a junior appointment. But, as in all things, there is a point at which
quantity becomes excess. Fundamentally, to publish you need to have something
valuable to say. High-impact publications—those that are cited and remembered—
are the product of a considered piece of sustained research, not the outcome of a
perceived need to get one more paper in print based on the minimal publishable in-
crement. Again, it would be dishonest to deny that some academics succeed, in part,
due to their ability to self-promote; considering how to make others aware of your
work is an important part of being an effective researcher. But publication should be
a consequence of having achieved good results, not a substitute.
Dissemination Plans
The issue, then, is to choose what to disseminate, and when. If you leave all thoughts
of publication until after you graduate, the chances are that you will not publish at
all. The way to overcome this is to develop a plan for disseminating material from
your project early in your study—perhaps as soon as the topic of your work is clear.
The way to think about this plan is as a series of graded challenges, where the aim
of each challenge is to capture some key element of the work in the form of a paper
or presentation. In my (Gruba’s) PhD, the list of challenges I made up as I wrote my
thesis had these components: