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.