Incorporating publications in your thesis

Learn how to plan for and include publications in your thesis.

Incorporating publications in your thesis

Publications and your doctorate thesis

This resource provides a brief introduction to incorporating publications in your thesis. It includes activities to help you apply tips and reflect on your learning, and should take you 15-20 minutes to read and complete. Check out the further resources at the bottom of each section and references on the last page for more information on this topic.

Including papers that you have written for publication as part of your thesis shows your achievements and impact as a researcher.

This page looks at some key considerations for including publications in your thesis and connecting them into a unified narrative.

Approaching a thesis that includes publication

There are several approaches to incorporating publications into your thesis.
You might:

  • include individual papers that you have already prepared, or start with a broad thesis plan that sets out the individual papers you wish to submit for publication as you work on your research project.
  • finalise your publications before or after you’ve written the related thesis chapters.
  • be modifying your publications to fit the thesis or adapting your thesis into publications.

No matter what your circumstances, the university offers a wide range of options for putting together a graduate research thesis. Keep in mind:

  • The same criteria, including the required volume of work, apply to theses with or without publication, and theses with small or large publication proportions.
  • Focus on the thesis as a whole and the integration of any publication to strengthen the thesis, rather than the number or status of your publications.
  • Your thesis, first and foremost, should provide a clear and cohesive narrative of your research to your readers.

Challenges of a thesis that includes publication

Although any form of thesis will have its challenges, writing a thesis that includes publication may create extra demands on you.

For example, choosing to get your work published early in your candidature might mean you feel the pressure to write like an expert, even when you don’t yet feel like one.

Also, your papers might speak to different audiences with different purposes at different stages of your research, and follow different journal conventions. This means that, when it comes time to incorporate your publications into a longer piece of work, you will need to align them and make them fit the purpose and audience of your thesis.

To help you start tackling these challenges, it’s useful to know what qualities a doctorate thesis needs to demonstrate and think about how to curate your publications to show these.

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:

  • 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?

  • 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?

  • 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?

  • 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?

  • 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?

For information on how to write a paper for publication and on policy questions about formal requirements for a thesis that includes publications, click on ‘Further resources’.

Use the side menu to go the next section: Planning your thesis including publications, where we explore thesis and publication mapping tools.

Planning your thesis including publications

Aim to plan your publications as part of initial planning of the whole thesis. This reduces duplication or gaps between the papers, and involves less work than retrofitting publications to your thesis later on. Nevertheless, it’s never too late to recalibrate your plan with emerging publications in mind.

Use planning tools

Planning tools such as a thesis map and publication map can be used both prospectively and retrospectively. It’s a good idea to go through this process in the thesis planning phase, and review the results regularly throughout your candidature.

This video shows you how to use a thesis mapping template and publication mapping tool to plan your thesis and publications. You can download the thesis mapping template (DOCX 23.0 KB) and publication mapping template  (DOCX 19.9 KB) that are shown in the video.

How to plan your thesis and publications

Consider how publications relate to the thesis

It's rare to have a linear, one-to-one relationship whereby each publication answers one research question completely. An example of this might be that each publication reports one experiment in a series of experiments that correspond neatly to the list of aims and hypotheses in a thesis. Even if your thesis fits this category, you still need to demonstrate how these aims and hypotheses relate together as part of a whole narrative.

More often, though, your publications will address the overarching research question in a complementary manner, for example by using different methods or focusing on different aspects of the problem. Ask:

  • How do the papers complement one another and provide a nuanced answer to the research question?
  • If they are in conflict, how could you resolve it or justify a more complex answer?

Sequence publications logically

Incorporate publications in an order that progresses your argument, not necessarily in the order of the writing or publication dates. It is usual to have one publication as one chapter in the thesis.

However, if it makes more sense to combine two shorter papers into one chapter, or to omit part of a publication from a chapter, explain and justify your choice clearly in the introduction to the chapter.

Learn from example theses

As part of your planning, you may find it valuable to look through a few examples of theses that include publications. Use the prompts below to help you reflect on how you could learn from examples.

1. Explore examples of thesis and chapter formats when including publications. Which thesis and chapter format resonates the most with your thesis plan?

2. Have a look at a few theses that include publications in your field or as close to your field as you can find. You can use the example theses on the Graduate Research Hub or find your own examples on Minerva. Ask:

  • How many papers for publication are included as part of the thesis?
  • What kind of papers are included? Empirical, theoretical, methodological or review?
  • What structure does the thesis have? Does it follow an IMRAD (Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion) structure, a variation of this or a different structure? Note down its key parts.
  • How would you like your thesis to be structured?

Compare you answers to the above questions to your thesis plan or map. Would you like to change anything about it?

Use the side menu to go the next section: Relating publications to thesis sections, where we look at the role of different thesis sections in integrating publications.

Relating publications to thesis sections

Sections of your writing that are exclusive to your thesis, which do not appear in your publications, can help integrate your publications by guiding readers to see links between your thesis and those publications. These links can demonstrate a strong sense of control over the design of your thesis and show examiners that you can connect the parts to the whole seamlessly.

The role of thesis sections in integrating your publications

  • 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).

    • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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

  • 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)

    Example visualisation of how to integrate findings from publications using bullet points and arrows

Explore an example

This example raises your awareness of the different roles the thesis introduction plays in connecting publications to the thesis. In the presentation below, you will read three introduction excerpts from a history thesis (adapted from Mody, 2018, pp. 1–19). Answer the question on each slide, then turn the card to read the analysis. Some key language has been bolded to aid you.

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Use the side menu to go the next section: Establishing a cohesive narrative, where we look at how to approach the narrative for a thesis that includes publications.

Establishing a cohesive narrative

The narrative of a thesis refers to the broad enquiry that develops through and connects the more data-focused parts of the thesis, which can include publications.

The narrative typically includes the thesis introduction and thesis discussion/conclusion, as well as the text that introduces and reflects on the data chapters.

Establishing an effective narrative can help you:

  • Transition between ideas smoothly
  • Create a unified whole for your thesis
  • Emphasise aspects of a publication to both differentiate and connect it to the thesis
  • Resolve gaps, repetitions or tensions between publications or other thesis components
  • Address issues that publications don’t accommodate but which are key to thesis examination, such as a detailed exploration of ethical challenges or your journey of learning and development as a researcher
  • Develop new publication ideas, which may emerge from a comprehensive view of the whole thesis.

Engaging in crafting the narrative throughout your candidature can strengthen both your work and your researcher identity.

Overarching argument

Use the table of contents to place your publications in the thesis and gauge whether you can see a clear argument across all thesis components. The following example demonstrates how publications sit alongside chapters written for the thesis as equal components making up a whole.

While acknowledgement of a publication should be made, it’s important to integrate it into the thesis and avoid over-emphasising the role of publications to the extent that they may undermine any non-publication material.

Example table of contents that indicates publications being combined with chapters written for the thesis to make a cohesive narrative
Example table of contents showing overarching narrative (Mody, 2018, p. vi)

Examine example narratives

Work through the following examples of thesis narratives and complete the associated activities to find out more about the features of an effective narrative. Some critical language has been bolded to help with your observations.

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Final tip

Reflect on the role of your publications, whether completed or intended, throughout the planning and writing of your thesis. This helps you to approach both your publications and your thesis proactively, and build strong research outputs and skills as a researcher-writer.

For more information and support in your writing,Explore: Academic Skills Graduate Research services

  • The “exegesis” in PhD by publication

  • Arundel, J. (2015). The spatio-temporal distribution of honey bees and floral resources in Australia [PhD thesis, University of Melbourne]. http://hdl.handle.net/11343/59612

    Bibb, J. (2016). Musical recovery: The role of group singing in regaining healthy relationships with music to promote mental health recovery [PhD thesis, University of Melbourne]. http://hdl.handle.net/11343/124271

    Mody, F. (2018). Doctors down under: European medical migrants in Victoria (Australia), 1930-60 [PhD thesis, University of Melbourne]. http://hdl.handle.net/11343/221550

    Nygaard, L., & Solli, K. (2021). Strategies for writing a thesis by publication in the social sciences and humanities. Routledge.