How To Convert Your Master Thesis To A Journal Article
Hello everyone welcome to research hub in this video i will provide you some guideline on how to convert your master thesis to a journal article if you have written a master thesis and you would like to know why you should publish it as a journal article and how you should proceed then you will find this video very useful so first of all. Why would you like to publish in a journal. First of all it's a more rich more global rich and you may wonder like you know. Nowadays many universities provide open access publication of the master thesis itself so that could also make a global reach but then why should you publish in a journal but the thing is not many people really read these master theses published in a open repository. And that's because we don't know if the tcs if the fine whatever presented in the thesis are really validated. So by validation what i mean is i'm in peer review so in the journal when you submit a paper to other scientists minimum to other scientists often reviews your work and gives you feedback and only when you pass these two other scientists or scholars in the field. Then it would be accepted by for publications in the journal by the editor right so in this process. Whatever you've done in your research it gets more validated. That is why we can really trust on the results of the journal articles. More compared to a non-peer-reviewed work which is published in a repository. Okay so in. General having published in a journal increases more rich and my philosophy in general is that i would like to. I would like people to read my work so i want my work to be read by as many people as possible if nobody reads my work. The work has no value. So that's my principle so i try to make sure that my works are more widely available and people can access them and read them and find them useful. Also when you publish it in a journal it helps you to build a scholarly profile if you're going for a phd then having a publication or two it always helps in the phd process.
People know that you know how to publish you know how to do research. So they're more likely to hire you and you may wonder that you know i'm not going to do a phd now so you are not going to publish your thesis now. That's totally fine. But the thing is i have seen many people who went to industry after their masters but then after two years or after five years they came back to do a phd. They suddenly got interested in doing a phd. But then if you had a paper from your master thesis normally it helps a lot in your phd hiring process in your phd. Uh in in securing a phd position. And if you're already interested in academia then a journal article could really help to get academic position in many countries. We don't really need a phd to join as a assistant professor or lecturer so in those cases if you want if you have a publication from your thesis it strengthens your application for the academic position but also these publications are often highly valued in industry many industries. They rely on a lot of research work. They have consultancy dedicated consultancy departments. They have dedicated research and development departments. So if you are interested to do some work in those departments having a publication is always beneficial so now what are the differences between a journal paper and a thesis so the most important one is the length you know journal articles are usually between seven thousand and eight thousand words. Maximum ten thousand words. It would be really difficult to find journals which publish articles which are more than ten thousand words long including everything including reference and everything. But you will see that. Most of the master thesis are often 20 000 words or something like that the students i supervise. I always tell them that. Try to write between 12 000 and 15 000 words but most of the time they end up writing 20 twenty two thousand words so then the thing is when you want to convert it to a journal article then you have to cut a lot so if you have written twenty thousand to get to ten thousand you have to remove ten thousand and i don't know about others but it really hurts when i put a lot of effort if i write when i put a lot of effort and write a lot and then if i have to delete all the writing that i've done it hurts so i think it should be similar for others as well so that is why one of my philosophy is that.
I try to write very specific and very to the point and uh try to write most of the time word is relevant but it is totally fine you if you have written like fifteen thousand or twenty thousand words so what you have to do is now we have to cut it down to seven thousand to eight thousand words or something like that and when you are cutting it down what you have to do is you have to reduce detail okay so no need to present the same thing in table and figure which is very common in master thesis the same information present in both ways then also you will see that you have written many sentences which are like you first wrote a sentence and then you write another sentence that it means that so if you have already said something then why you really need to discuss it again with it means that or in other words so these kind of sentences duplicate sentences are very common and you can remove them okay so normally. We don't really need to present any two information multiple times. We remove all the redundant information redundant tables and figures and also in terms of tests and statistical analysis. Sometimes you report like too many details. We did these we did that. And after that these and that but some of the statistical tests are very important so which we have to report but often all the things that we have done to learn this method to apply this method often they are not really relevant so you can actually remove some of those okay so normally these are some uh guidelines that how you can actually make it shorten so the main idea here is that you have to be very precise present only relevant information and you have to bring the thesis to between seven thousand to eight thousand words.
Uh ideally and here are some main components of a journal article so first we will have a title and titles are normally between 18 words. Okay some journals have a shorter limit but most journal allow up to 18 words. Then you have abstract abstract should not be more than 250 words. I would say go. For target 200 not more than 200 and then keywords you have to present four or five keywords maximum six keywords so keywords are normally i put the keywords which help people to find my article faster so when they google with the keywords then they should find my article so i try to find those relevant keywords and put it in my article and then you will have the main section where you will have an introduction which motivates the study then it will have literature review you have data and methodology results discussion conclusion references and sometimes appendix. So some of the detail if you like to put in the paper which are not like very important but still relevant you can put them in the appendix and nowadays most of the journals actually allow electronic appendix where. They don't have any page limit. So you can move a lot of things from your thesis to the appendix actually and provide it as a supplementary material and here one easy rule of thumb. Is that if you see here. We have like one two three four five six seven main parts. Okay and if you write about 1 000 words as the rule of thumb per section that you will have 7 000 words so it could be like 200 200 words 300 words plus minus 1 000 but approximately 1 000 words for each of these seven sections leads to about seven to eight thousand words right. That could be a rule of thumb to start converting your thesis to a journal here. I'm going to mention a little bit about the journal submission process so normally you first have to select a journal. You have to pay attention to where where are you submitting.
One of the thing is that the easiest way is that you can actually look into your reference list the journals that appear most in your reference list that could be the journal where you can submit your work but always consult with your supervisor here. We have some list. Abs list abdc list norwegian list so there we have some ranking of journals. Try to look for good journals good ranked journals and we also have some video on research have on how to select journals so have a look on them. You will find some video link below in the video description regardless of this. I recommend you to always consult with your supervisor. And in the journal submission process you have to prepare some documents. You have to prepare some documents first. One is cover later addressing the editor in chief of the journal where you mentioned that where you mention the key contributions of the article and why this article is relevant for the journal. Then you will have a title page where you will put information about the authors of the paper so in the main paper you will have no names the most of the paid journals. They follow blind peer review process where the reviewers cannot know who is the authors and the authors cannot know who's the reviewer so you cannot have any name in the main paper but you will submit a title page where you will put your details which can be seen by the editors of the journal. Okay but not the reviewers and often we need some information about declaration of interest where you say that you have no conflicting interest. Recently there are journals which request the author credit statement. Where you have to say who did what which author if you have multiple authors. Sometimes it happens that you did your master thesis but then when the when you start with the publication some other peoples may also join in the process to improve the quality of the work and to convert it to the journal. So who did what works. So those you can actually mention in the author credit statement some journals require highlights of the paper so there you will have like four or five bullet points mentioning the most important contributions of the of the article and also it's good to always know a little bit about peer review process.
So what happens in the pr review process. Is that when you submit article to the journal. It goes to the editor in editor editor-in-chief then the editor-in-chief looks into the paper and tries to decide whether to send it for peer review. Or not if he thinks it. The article is of good quality. He sends it for peer review to two anonymous reviewers. Okay and then the reviewers accept the review request and then read through it and then give you some feedback so the feedback comes to editor in chief. Then the return chief against communicates the feedback to you and your job is to respond to the feedback make required revisions and resubmit the manuscript. Then the return chief again is going to send your article to the reviewers and the reviewers will check if you have addressed the comments and then they might give some additional comments or they might recommend acceptance of the article and then they send it back to the editor-in-chief and the editor-in-chief communicates with you. There could be multiple rounds of revisions. Okay there could be two three uh sometimes four rounds of revisions as well. Okay so you have to be really patient in this review process and never argue with the reviewer. Try to do what they are asking if you don't agree with any of their comments uh just politely. Uh explain why you think that the comment is not uh applicable but never argue with the reviewers try to communicate nicely with them and in this process. Actually your supervisor can help you a lot because it is likely that your supervisor is more experienced in this process. And here's some practical tips. First of all put effort in revising the thesis and have no mercy so when converting from a twenty thousand thesis to a seven thousand eight thousand word article have no mercy remove everything that is irrelevant.
Okay and try to keep only the most important and relevant things and remove all redundant information and normally you should be the first author when trying to convert it into a journal article but always have your supervisor as the corresponding author. Add your supervisor as the second author and the corresponding author if you have multiple supervisors at both of them. The core supervisors and the main supervisors. Sometimes it may happen that in the review process or in the conversion to journal article process. You may add one or two people from the outside of the supervisory board and who may also join as an author that is totally fine but make sure that you have yourself the first author and your supervisors as the corresponding author and normally when you submit the article. Uh keep patience. The review process can take three months to up to two three years. We recently got a paper published which was under review for four years and then we got accepted in a paper but accepted in a journal. But it's a it was a good experience. The paper improved a lot in four years. And also it's a good journal so it was win-win and have the mindset to work on multiple rounds of revision. So you know it might happen. That after you send the paper to the journal you are working on something else but it will come back to you so have the mindset to really work on the revisions but normally the revisions does not really take much of your time. You know often you will see that the revisions uh take one week of work or something like that. So i i believe it should be manageable. Even if you're working full time in indian industry or and in some other jobs right and pay attention to where you submit. Don't submit in fake journals. You have to really careful about it if you publish it in a fake journal then all the efforts you have put are in vain.
Okay they are of no use because there are many fake journals all again. We have some videos on that how to identify good journals. You will find link below in the video description so have a look on that. Don't publish in fake journals and thank you for watching. I hope you find this video useful. And if so share with your friends and colleagues and subscribe to research hub.
People know that you know how to publish you know how to do research. So they're more likely to hire you and you may wonder that you know i'm not going to do a phd now so you are not going to publish your thesis now. That's totally fine. But the thing is i have seen many people who went to industry after their masters but then after two years or after five years they came back to do a phd. They suddenly got interested in doing a phd. But then if you had a paper from your master thesis normally it helps a lot in your phd hiring process in your phd. Uh in in securing a phd position. And if you're already interested in academia then a journal article could really help to get academic position in many countries. We don't really need a phd to join as a assistant professor or lecturer so in those cases if you want if you have a publication from your thesis it strengthens your application for the academic position but also these publications are often highly valued in industry many industries. They rely on a lot of research work. They have consultancy dedicated consultancy departments. They have dedicated research and development departments. So if you are interested to do some work in those departments having a publication is always beneficial so now what are the differences between a journal paper and a thesis so the most important one is the length you know journal articles are usually between seven thousand and eight thousand words. Maximum ten thousand words. It would be really difficult to find journals which publish articles which are more than ten thousand words long including everything including reference and everything. But you will see that. Most of the master thesis are often 20 000 words or something like that the students i supervise. I always tell them that. Try to write between 12 000 and 15 000 words but most of the time they end up writing 20 twenty two thousand words so then the thing is when you want to convert it to a journal article then you have to cut a lot so if you have written twenty thousand to get to ten thousand you have to remove ten thousand and i don't know about others but it really hurts when i put a lot of effort if i write when i put a lot of effort and write a lot and then if i have to delete all the writing that i've done it hurts so i think it should be similar for others as well so that is why one of my philosophy is that.
I try to write very specific and very to the point and uh try to write most of the time word is relevant but it is totally fine you if you have written like fifteen thousand or twenty thousand words so what you have to do is now we have to cut it down to seven thousand to eight thousand words or something like that and when you are cutting it down what you have to do is you have to reduce detail okay so no need to present the same thing in table and figure which is very common in master thesis the same information present in both ways then also you will see that you have written many sentences which are like you first wrote a sentence and then you write another sentence that it means that so if you have already said something then why you really need to discuss it again with it means that or in other words so these kind of sentences duplicate sentences are very common and you can remove them okay so normally. We don't really need to present any two information multiple times. We remove all the redundant information redundant tables and figures and also in terms of tests and statistical analysis. Sometimes you report like too many details. We did these we did that. And after that these and that but some of the statistical tests are very important so which we have to report but often all the things that we have done to learn this method to apply this method often they are not really relevant so you can actually remove some of those okay so normally these are some uh guidelines that how you can actually make it shorten so the main idea here is that you have to be very precise present only relevant information and you have to bring the thesis to between seven thousand to eight thousand words.
Uh ideally and here are some main components of a journal article so first we will have a title and titles are normally between 18 words. Okay some journals have a shorter limit but most journal allow up to 18 words. Then you have abstract abstract should not be more than 250 words. I would say go. For target 200 not more than 200 and then keywords you have to present four or five keywords maximum six keywords so keywords are normally i put the keywords which help people to find my article faster so when they google with the keywords then they should find my article so i try to find those relevant keywords and put it in my article and then you will have the main section where you will have an introduction which motivates the study then it will have literature review you have data and methodology results discussion conclusion references and sometimes appendix. So some of the detail if you like to put in the paper which are not like very important but still relevant you can put them in the appendix and nowadays most of the journals actually allow electronic appendix where. They don't have any page limit. So you can move a lot of things from your thesis to the appendix actually and provide it as a supplementary material and here one easy rule of thumb. Is that if you see here. We have like one two three four five six seven main parts. Okay and if you write about 1 000 words as the rule of thumb per section that you will have 7 000 words so it could be like 200 200 words 300 words plus minus 1 000 but approximately 1 000 words for each of these seven sections leads to about seven to eight thousand words right. That could be a rule of thumb to start converting your thesis to a journal here. I'm going to mention a little bit about the journal submission process so normally you first have to select a journal. You have to pay attention to where where are you submitting.
One of the thing is that the easiest way is that you can actually look into your reference list the journals that appear most in your reference list that could be the journal where you can submit your work but always consult with your supervisor here. We have some list. Abs list abdc list norwegian list so there we have some ranking of journals. Try to look for good journals good ranked journals and we also have some video on research have on how to select journals so have a look on them. You will find some video link below in the video description regardless of this. I recommend you to always consult with your supervisor. And in the journal submission process you have to prepare some documents. You have to prepare some documents first. One is cover later addressing the editor in chief of the journal where you mentioned that where you mention the key contributions of the article and why this article is relevant for the journal. Then you will have a title page where you will put information about the authors of the paper so in the main paper you will have no names the most of the paid journals. They follow blind peer review process where the reviewers cannot know who is the authors and the authors cannot know who's the reviewer so you cannot have any name in the main paper but you will submit a title page where you will put your details which can be seen by the editors of the journal. Okay but not the reviewers and often we need some information about declaration of interest where you say that you have no conflicting interest. Recently there are journals which request the author credit statement. Where you have to say who did what which author if you have multiple authors. Sometimes it happens that you did your master thesis but then when the when you start with the publication some other peoples may also join in the process to improve the quality of the work and to convert it to the journal. So who did what works. So those you can actually mention in the author credit statement some journals require highlights of the paper so there you will have like four or five bullet points mentioning the most important contributions of the of the article and also it's good to always know a little bit about peer review process.
So what happens in the pr review process. Is that when you submit article to the journal. It goes to the editor in editor editor-in-chief then the editor-in-chief looks into the paper and tries to decide whether to send it for peer review. Or not if he thinks it. The article is of good quality. He sends it for peer review to two anonymous reviewers. Okay and then the reviewers accept the review request and then read through it and then give you some feedback so the feedback comes to editor in chief. Then the return chief against communicates the feedback to you and your job is to respond to the feedback make required revisions and resubmit the manuscript. Then the return chief again is going to send your article to the reviewers and the reviewers will check if you have addressed the comments and then they might give some additional comments or they might recommend acceptance of the article and then they send it back to the editor-in-chief and the editor-in-chief communicates with you. There could be multiple rounds of revisions. Okay there could be two three uh sometimes four rounds of revisions as well. Okay so you have to be really patient in this review process and never argue with the reviewer. Try to do what they are asking if you don't agree with any of their comments uh just politely. Uh explain why you think that the comment is not uh applicable but never argue with the reviewers try to communicate nicely with them and in this process. Actually your supervisor can help you a lot because it is likely that your supervisor is more experienced in this process. And here's some practical tips. First of all put effort in revising the thesis and have no mercy so when converting from a twenty thousand thesis to a seven thousand eight thousand word article have no mercy remove everything that is irrelevant.
Okay and try to keep only the most important and relevant things and remove all redundant information and normally you should be the first author when trying to convert it into a journal article but always have your supervisor as the corresponding author. Add your supervisor as the second author and the corresponding author if you have multiple supervisors at both of them. The core supervisors and the main supervisors. Sometimes it may happen that in the review process or in the conversion to journal article process. You may add one or two people from the outside of the supervisory board and who may also join as an author that is totally fine but make sure that you have yourself the first author and your supervisors as the corresponding author and normally when you submit the article. Uh keep patience. The review process can take three months to up to two three years. We recently got a paper published which was under review for four years and then we got accepted in a paper but accepted in a journal. But it's a it was a good experience. The paper improved a lot in four years. And also it's a good journal so it was win-win and have the mindset to work on multiple rounds of revision. So you know it might happen. That after you send the paper to the journal you are working on something else but it will come back to you so have the mindset to really work on the revisions but normally the revisions does not really take much of your time. You know often you will see that the revisions uh take one week of work or something like that. So i i believe it should be manageable. Even if you're working full time in indian industry or and in some other jobs right and pay attention to where you submit. Don't submit in fake journals. You have to really careful about it if you publish it in a fake journal then all the efforts you have put are in vain.
Okay they are of no use because there are many fake journals all again. We have some videos on that how to identify good journals. You will find link below in the video description so have a look on that. Don't publish in fake journals and thank you for watching. I hope you find this video useful. And if so share with your friends and colleagues and subscribe to research hub.