If you’ve been reading Practical PhD for a while, you know that one theme is that there is no ONE way to do things in this academic life. In the spirit of this, I want to share something that people are often shocked by about my publications. I am five years out of grad school and four years into a tenure-track position and I have not published anything from my dissertation. To be clear, I have been publishing. I just haven’t published anything based on data from my dissertation yet. I share this to highlight that there’s not just one path in publishing.
Some folks have their very first publication come out of their dissertation. Many start careers on the tenure track revising their dissertation into articles and/or a book manuscript to start producing publications that count for tenure. My path was to start by reviving old work that had sat on the back burner while I applied to jobs and postdocs and finished my dissertation. This included research projects I started before graduate school such as MPA thesis, as well as early graduate school projects like my MA paper. I also worked on new collaborations as opportunities arose and ideas came up that provided opportunities to not just focus on sole-authored research. I also invested in some new ideas as there were CFPs for special issues closely related to my research interests.
As I did that, I was weighing my options for what to do with my dissertation. During my postdoc year, I debated whether I wanted to write a book or not and, if so, if I wanted to get tenure based on a book publication given that I had a good number of articles already in the works. Having decided I want to pursue a book publication post-tenure, I have spent time developing the overarching argument that I want to put forth in the book and have worked on incorporating new data and analyses, outlining the new chapters, and even drafting some. I’ve also planned out which chapters I’d like to modify to publish as articles and am working on some of those now.
You have options in your path to publishing. Whatever path you choose should develop a pipeline including projects in the phases of idea development, data collection, data analysis, drafting manuscripts, and submitted for publishing. This doesn’t mean that you have to pursue your research in a linear fashion. You can skip to an idea or a project in data collection before coming back to something that is already drafted. In fact, that can provide some distance from a draft to see it with fresh eyes, lead you to work on a project that brings you joy (something that is easy to lose in the grind of chasing publications on the tenure track), or allow you to prioritize something that is timely.
In my case, I wanted to get those pre-dissertation projects out the door, while also pursuing opportunities for new research that came with those special issues. While I would not recommend the timeline on which I wrote those two special issue papers from scratch to anyone, I am very proud of the scholarship I produced. Those special issue articles also contributed to my thinking about future research projects including the book I want to write based on my dissertation.
So as you’re making plans for your path to publishing, remember that there is no one way to get there. You have to find the path that keeps you moving forward without killing your joy.
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