a journal which publishes the same kind of material as your
paper, and has a good but not necessarily a top reputation in
your field, ideally one with fairly low time lags and an approach
of encouraging new authors. Again the conference circuit is
your best guide to the state of play across the main journals in
your discipline. But it is always worth ‘triangulating’ two or
three views of each journal, to control for the potent misinfor-
mation capabilities of professional rumour machines.
Once you have a clear target journal in view, amend your
chapter to fit its requirements, both small and large. Try to
make sure that everything conforms exactly to the journal’s
style guide, and that the references are in the required format.
Editors are notoriously hostile to authors who submit material
in the wrong style format. But the single most important
change to put a chapter into paper format is always to get the
length down. Journal papers should neverbe more than 8000
words long – only academic superstars will be accepted above
this length in most fields. Be careful to split up long chapters
into manageable paper-length components before trying to get
them published. Squeezing the length down even further to
7000 or even 6000 words will usually greatly boost your
chances of getting a main article published. If you go much
below this length, however, there is a danger that the editor or
referees may not see your piece as a proper main article but as
an over-length research note. They could then ask for a 5000
word paper to be cut further, to fit within the normal 3000 to
4000 word limit for research notes.
Journal papers also need to be written in a different style
from chapters. They must be completely self-standing and inde-
pendently intelligible, with no references to material in other
chapters. Papers also need to be written to do just one job, to
hit a single target well – whereas PhD chapters often handle
several aspects, a key reason why they are longer. You need a
fast and preferably high-impact start to your paper, devoid of
any waffle, which gets to the key issues quickly. Cut out long
literature reviews or set-up components, because your readers
are experts with busy professional lives. Try and reference other
recent synoptic literature reviews to avoid running over more
familiar territory yourself. But make sure that you make suffi-
cient appropriate genuflections to previous scholarship in the
246 ◆AUTHORING A PHD