Albert Barkley's Blog: Transform PhD Dissertation into Research Paper

PhD dissertation often takes years to get finalised. Every sentence in the PhD dissertation must have strong evidence. Apart from evidence, it should also explicit strong critical, as well as analytical skills. It needs precision in writing from the scholar too. It gives specific instructions about the accuracy of the facts and figures. In short, PhD dissertation is the legal proof of what you did in your PhD research. After completing all these requirements, the next thing to do is converting your PhD dissertation into a research paper. So in this article, we will discuss some top ways of transforming your PhD dissertation into a research paper.

Search for the target research article

The topmost way of transforming PhD dissertation in the research paper is to get instruction from the journals. Every journal has its own set of instructions. Hence the dissertation’s transformation will become easier after selecting the journal. For selecting the journal, you should keep the following things in mind;

Short-list the journal of interests.
Find the impact factor for each of the selected journals.
Match your needs with scope of the journal.
Check the journal’s eligibility criteria.
Read the journal’s instructions.

This detailed research about the journal can quickly clarify most of your ambiguities. If you systematically find a good journal, you will get help from them in many ways.

Revise the word count

Dissertation is one of the lengthiest documents that most students have ever typed. But the research paper is somewhat different. It aims to spread the research in the shortest possible way. So the second most important thing for research paper drafting is that of ‘comprehensive techniques’. In general, the average word count of PhD dissertation is 10k-15k. On the other hand, most of the journals suggest a 3k to 6k word count for research papers. But presenting everything in the research paper is not advisable. Hence, to revise the word count, you just need to comprehend the details.

Make a compelling research paper title

The title is important for attracting the audience. Mostly, the PhD dissertation remains unpublished. But the sole purpose of a research paper is that of publication. So to achieve the publication goals, you should make the title compelling. To do so, you can visit several online headline analysers. Further, there are certain online tools for selecting compelling keyword analysis tools as well. But if you want to digitally transform the title, you must consider the following things;

These tools are usually better for web-content traffic generation.
There is limited application of these tools within the academic research tasks.

Yet if you still want to use them for making your research paper, be conscious about field-specific keywords. You must academically alter your research paper title as well. This is because the research paper title is a little different from the blog’s titles.

Refine the methodology

For transforming a PhD dissertation into a research paper, refining the method section is another important task. You must refine the methodology section in research paper’s drafting aspect. In PhD Dissertation, a descriptive methodology is often acceptable. But in the research article, you have to sum up nearly 15k words into 5k words. In this case, descriptive methodology can ruin the overall structure of your research paper. Hence, in the methodology section, you should remain audience-oriented. Here, you can directly come to the point. There is no need to establish a background either.

Also Read This: How To Select A Good Future Plan For Your Studies?

Reshape your sentences again

In the PhD dissertation, due to extensive word count, many wordy sentences may present. But in a research paper, you should remain focused for the removal of wordiness. This is because most journals don’t accept the research paper if it contains wordiness, punctuation, or spelling errors.

Reconsideration of a number of references

In the PhD dissertation, there is often a long list of references at the end. A long list of references seems good. Because it helps us in proving our point of discussion. The recommended number of references in the PhD dissertation is about 7 per 1000 words. But the research papers may not follow this guideline every time. In general, the healthy number of references in a research paper is about 30-40 per 3k-6k words.

So you can get help from the above-mentioned top ways for transforming a PhD dissertation into a research paper.