Incorporating publications in your thesis

Showing doctorate qualities using your publications

High standards apply to the examination of a doctorate thesis. Nygaard and Solli (2021) synthesise these standards into five qualities:

• Publishability

  Your thesis writing needs to be of a publishable standard. While this can be evaluated in terms of potential publishability, including published work or papers intended for publication in your thesis can provide clear evidence of this.

  Ask:

  • How many publications do you intend to include in your thesis? What are they?
  • What are the publication statuses of these papers (intended/under review/published)?
  • What journals are your works published in/intended for? Are they peer-reviewed?
• Disciplinary belonging

  While your publications need to speak to the scholarly communities of the journals you submit them to, which may or may not fit neatly in a single discipline, your thesis will need to show that it belongs in the discipline it sits within. Show awareness of the terminology, conventions, key conversations or debates of your field, even when you’re deviating from these.

  If your thesis is interdisciplinary, state early in your writing what disciplines it brings together and why; you will also need to deal with the terminology and conventions of these disciplines for readers who may not be familiar with them.

  Ask:

  • What discipline(s) does your thesis belong in?
  • How do your publications relate to this discipline?
  • What disciplinary terminology, conventions, conversations or debates are you drawing on in your thesis?
• Originality

  Your thesis needs to show you’re making a new and significant contribution to your field.

  This could be providing a new understanding of or solution to an existing problem, building a new model, framework or methodology for tackling an old issue, or continuing or investigating someone else’s work. Originality involves finding your own angle or position on your research problem, not just reporting new data. This angle or position should be embedded in your whole thesis, including your publications.

  Ask:

  • What contribution will your thesis make to your field?
  • In what ways will this contribution be new and significant?
  • What are the contributions of your publications? How do they align with the overall contribution of the thesis?
• Independence

  While you can draw extensively on your discipline, your examiners will be looking for clear evidence of your ability to think independently and express your own ideas confidently as a researcher and writer.

  If your research is part of a bigger team project, or if you intend to include co-authored papers in your thesis, indicate clearly which part of the work you undertook, how your work shaped the bigger project and what you learned from working with others.

  Ask:

  • Is your research part of a bigger project involving a team of researchers?
  • Are you including co-authored papers in your thesis? If so, do they meet the University’s authorship requirements for inclusion?
  • If you answered ‘yes’ to either of the above questions, what is your part of the work? How has it shaped the bigger work? What have you learned from the collaboration?
• Cohesiveness

  Your thesis, whether with or without publication, needs to form a cohesive text from beginning to end. All its elements need to align effectively with one another to make a unified overarching argument.

  For example, your conclusion should address at a high level the research problem described in the introduction, whereas the middle chapters should pace the answer to the research question or hypothesis in a way that draws on the foregoing chapters and builds up to the more conceptual discussion at the end.

  Ask:

  • Can you identify an overarching argument in your thesis? If so, what is it?
  • What are the key messages of your thesis chapters, including publications?
  • How do these messages relate to one another and the overarching argument?

The role of thesis sections in integrating your publications

• Thesis introduction

  Gives you the chance to frame, explicitly, the relationship between your publications and the thesis (the examples given below this presentation will indicate some ways to do this).

• Literature review
  • Relates directly to your overarching research question
  • Is more comprehensive and contains more detail than the background sections of publications
  • Can include a paper for publication, which may need modifying so that it addresses your thesis question with an appropriate breadth and depth.
• Methods

  If the methods in your included publications don’t demonstrate the overarching approach of the thesis, or if they have evolved since, consider:

  • Writing an overview of the methodology and its development in the introduction or a separate methodology chapter.
  • Discussing how the methods reported in the publications link to the overarching methodology in the introduction or reflection sections of the chapters that contain the publications.
• Introductions to chapters with publications

  A chapter that contains publication typically begins with an added introductory section. In this section, you can:

  • List the paper(s) included in the chapter.
  • Briefly overview its specific aims or hypotheses in the context of the whole thesis.
  • State any changes you’ve made to the original paper (additions, deletions and other modifications) and briefly give reasons for these changes.
• Methods, results, discussions or reflections added to publications

  If a publication forms sufficient material for a chapter, a basic chapter structure including an introductory section followed by the paper is a great choice. However, if the publication forms only part of the chapter, consider a more complex chapter structure, such as the following:

  1. Introduction – including specific aims and hypotheses
  2. Methods not included in the paper
  3. Results not included in the paper
  4. Paper 1
  5. Discussion – extension of the paper’s discussion, further method development
• Discussion/conclusion

  While chapters that include publications usually highlight their specific contributions, the overall thesis discussion or conclusion should state the combined significance of all the findings at a more conceptual level.

  You can synthesise findings from your papers using visualisation, such as in this example:

  Visualising integration of findings across publications using bullet points and arrows (Bjerke, 2017, cited in Nygaard & Solli, 2021, p. 145)