One of the most
common questions I receive, as a journal editor, is how do I make my
dissertation into an article? This is the first in a series in which I will
discuss this issue and offer some suggestions on how to approach this difficult
task.
Let's review a few
basics of the differences between a dissertation and a published journal
article. An article, based on your project will be much shorter than your
original dissertation. While a dissertation is often between 100-200 pages, a
manuscript for a journal article is rarely over 30 double-spaced pages. A
dissertation must exhaustively review the literature, however, the literature
in an article is provided to put the study into context; the key issue is to
lead the reader to clearly see the need for your study and the gap you are
addressing. Much of the information in a dissertation is repeated throughout
the paper- it can be characterized more as a book, a journal article should be
succinct and to the point. So a few issues we have identified: your article
should only have enough literature to put it into context, information should
not be repeated frequently, and it should be succinct. Remember the basis of a
journal article is the APA manual, so use the format it describes. Do check the
journal's website for any exceptions it might prefer over the APA manual.
The first step, I
recommend, is to do an outline of the project in an article format. Typically,
this will be the following:
Cover page (title,
your name, affiliation, and author notes),
Abstract (check
journal requirements- typically 200-250 words). Keywords
Body of paper
Title
of paper
(1-2
pgs) Introduce the need for the study (why should we care about the topic?)
(2-5 pgs) Literature review
discussing variables
Method
Participants
Materials
Procedure
Results
Discussion
References
Next time, we will
start cutting down your literature for the paper.
No comments:
Post a Comment