at last writes back accepting it, and after a very long further wait
it duly appears in print. In due course the article is referenced
five or six times in other articles or publications in the field over
the next five years, including three times by its own author in
other papers. After five years the paper is scarcely ever referred
to again. You might think that this account is pretty cynical and
extreme. But in fact the sketch above is a very moderate one and
not at all unusual. It captures my typical pre-publication
experience quite well, for example. And I have already noted
above the low citation rates of journal papers in general
(although, of course, I fondly believe that this aspect is not
typical of my own work).
Research students are often perplexed to find that meeting
the requirements for originality in the doctorate does not in
itself guarantee the publishability of their material. You might
ask, if a reputable university and (in Europe and British/
Commonwealth systems) independent examiners have
accepted that a research work is a substantive contribution to
knowledge, then surely professional journals in the same disci-
pline must recognize the same qualities? This matching up of
criteria might seem even closer for a papers model dissertation,
where the chapters are supposed to be potentially independ-
ently publishable. But in practice a great deal of material in PhD
dissertations may not be journal-publishable. In ‘big book’ the-
ses the lead-in and lead-out chapters are chiefly there to frame
the thesis core, and so they cannot usually be translated into
stand-alone journal articles. In many theses some of the dens-
est and most research-intensive core chapters may not be inde-
pendently publishable, because they consist of very detailed
case study or applications research at a micro-level. In addition
they are often much too long to fit within the normal paper
length (8000 words or less). Universities and examiners will
accept such detailed or micro-level work as perfectly valid
scholarship, and the kind of exploratory or observational con-
tribution that can be appropriately done by a PhD student. But
that does not necessarily mean that any journal wishes to
broadcast news of these discoveries, unless it is relevant for
broader professional debates.
As the Darwin epigraph to this section stresses (p. 227), all
such case material or detailed evidence has to be analysed and
244 ◆AUTHORING A PHD