Authoring a PhD

professionally competent. There are some exceptions in parts of the humanities, a few solely theoretical areas that may place a premium on not having an empirical base, such as philosophy, and some modern literary theory and cultural theory.
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Theoretical interest.
Of the one in ten articles which make genuine advances, quite a few are purely theoretical pieces,
calling fora reconceptualization of a particular topic, or advancing propositions which might (several years from now)
inspire an empirical research agenda. But genuine theoretical advances in the humanities, arts and social sciences are harder to achieve than it might appear from the outside.
When acting as journal referees, senior people are notoriously hostile to specious theoretical advances, especially those which rest on nothing more than neologisms (inventing anew word to label an already known phenomenon or point of view. In empirically orientated disciplines, referees and editors maybe sceptical that innovations which are purely theoretical and unaccompanied by evidence will have any application in practice.
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Interest and importance to a professional readership.
Material can be original and novel, but still be boring or of only minor interest to most people in a discipline if the topic covered is not seen as important. This criterion is especially relevant for omnibus journals that aspire to carry material from right across a discipline. Their editors will be especially resistant to publishing papers which may meet most of the other criteria in this list, but are unlikely to be widely read or seen as significant or interesting across a substantial section of their discipline.
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Relevance for the journal’s mission.
The editors of specialist journals, which aim only to tap a readership within a particular subfield of a discipline, will resist publishing material that is ‘non-core’ for them or even lies close to the boundaries of their field. They may fear that such material could blur the identity of their journal.
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Interest fora wider audience.
Across the humanities and social sciences some of the biggest-selling journals are long-established titles which manage to bridge across between a purely academic readership and a more general
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readership in professionally related fields. Editors of this kind of journal will not want to run material that only people with PhDs in the discipline care about or can understand.
A typical journal will use most but not all of the criteria shown in Figure 9.1. Soto this extent my composite form may overstate the difficulty of getting your work published. But on the other hand, top journals in each field are likely to require that a paper be judged good, above average or ‘outstanding’
on around half their editorial criteria, and without attracting any poor scores. Getting agreement on this from four, three or even two referees is often a challenge.
Yet despite the elaborate refereeing procedures most academics will readily acknowledge that contemporary journals contain a lot of routine papers. How great this proportion actually is will no doubt vary from subject to subject. And perhaps there maybe difficulty in securing agreement about which papers fall into this category. One now rather dated but still interesting attempt at systematically assessing the value of journal papers looked at those dealing with the psychology of memory and verbal learning. The authors (E. Tulving and SA. Madigan) found that two thirds of papers were ‘inconsequential’.
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They then classified a further quarter of their sample of papers as ‘ “run-of-the-mill”,
they represent technically competent variations on well-known themes. The routine and unimportant papers usually offered
‘one or more of the following conclusions:
(a)
variable X has an effect on variable Y;
(b)
the findings do not appear to be entirely inconsistent with the ABC theory;
(c)
the findings suggest a need for revising the ABC theory
(although no inkling is provided as to how);
(d)
processes understudy are extremely complex and cannot be readily understood;
(e)
the experiment clearly demonstrates the need for further research on this problem;
(f)
the experiment shows that the method used is useful for doing experiments of this type;
(g)
the results do not support the hypothesis, but the experiment now appears to bean inadequate test of it.’

Of most papers they looked at the evaluation team concluded that their main purpose lies in providing redundancy and assurance to those readers whose faith in the orderliness of nature … needs strengthening. This meant that in their judgement fewer than one in ten papers in the area genuinely advanced learning.
The leading American psychologist Robert J. Sternberg suggested that in his field the papers evaluated as out-of-the-ordinary and particularly useful do one or more of the following report results whose findings can be unambiguously interpreted report experiments with a particularly clever design, which can be used as a pattern or paradigm by other researchers report surprising findings which nonetheless make sense in some theoretical context debunk some previously held presupposition present afresh way of looking at an old problem report results of major theoretical or practical significance or integrate into anew, simpler framework, data that previously required a complex, possibly unwieldy framework’.
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The features in this list need changing a bit and extending for other disciplines, where experiments maybe unknown and even systematic data maybe scarce. Inmost of the social sciences it is very difficult to publish case study material, but easier to get journals to accept papers including quantitative data relating to more general theories or controversies. In arts and humanities subjects, papers are often more thematic or theoretical, and their usefulness may depend on their interpretative impact. More of a premium tends to be placed on good writing and style, plus the pursuit of scholarly norms,
such as originality, novelty, full referencing, new sources etc.
And, unlike the social sciences, journals in some humanities disciplines (like history) are more likely to accept case study material. But Sternberg’s criteria above still provide a helpful first checklist of questions to ask in assessing how worthwhile your own particular paper will be. And the contrast with the previous list of things that routine papers typically conclude provides quite a helpful sieve, which may help you sort out which of your chapters is worth ‘paperizing’ and which is not.
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So far I have focused solely on main articles in journals,
which are the primary means for advancing professional knowledge, and the chief product you can hope to get from one or more of your thesis chapters. But, especially when you are starting out on publishing, it is useful to bear in mind also that many journals also print shorter pieces, which have lower- quality thresholds for publication and maybe easier to achieve:
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