FastTrack LIVE #44 | Your Thesis Is NOT a Paper. Here’s How to Turn It Into One

You finished your thesis. You passed. Congratulations. But that does NOT mean your thesis is publishable.

In this session, I walk you step by step through how to convert a thesis chapter into a journal-ready paper using our Publishability Formula

💡 Publish Fast *Guaranteed*: Apply to work 1:1 with Prof Stuckler: https://www.stucklerconsulting.com/consultation/?el=podcast

🚀 Get our FREE workshop on how researchers publish in high-impact journals in under 90 days! https://www.stucklerconsulting.com/training/?el=podcast

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You'll learn:
→ Why thesis chapters get desk rejected
→ How to find your paper's ONE contribution
→ The creative destruction process for ruthless cutting
→ How to rebuild for your target journal
→ A 5-question self-test you can use today

This is the process I've used with my PhD students at Harvard, Oxford, and Cambridge.

As ever we'll take your questions this week and review your research submissions.

📋 Submit your work for Prof Stuckler's feedback at this week's workshop: https://forms.gle/gp9cceQfWrXXWcXb6

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Examiner signed off and and maybe you even got a good mark. Congratulations is a tremendous feeling. And now you want to publish. Excellent. It's not the same. Because something that people don't say loudly enough is that your thesis does not a paper make. I don't know why I sound like a Star Wars character. But submitting a just a thesis chapter straight to a journal is just a big mistake and it's a painful one because it's often going to get desk rejected. Because, as I'm going to talk about today, you've got lots of graduate student material in there. It's a thesis, it sounds like a thesis, it's structured like a thesis, it reads like a thesis, and it did what the thesis was supposed to do, which was convince your examiners that you know the field. But publishing is a different job. A journal paper takes something else. And so today I'm going to respond to questions that I get commonly, and I get this week, of how do you convert your thesis or a thesis chapter into something publishable, if you even can? And this is going to be particularly helpful for those who are planning a thesis now, because as you'll see today, a common mistake is completing a thesis, getting a good mark, and yet still having something that's completely unpublishable. So the way I'm going to help you navigate that is we're going to go revisit our publishability formula. Uh, and it's going to have five elements that you can run on your work today so that you know if what you're doing is going to have that publication possibility at the end of the road. And if not, that may be okay. That may still meet your needs, but better to have that knowledge going forward so you can make smarter and better decisions about meeting your goals and where to invest your time and energy. If you're new to the channel, I'm Professor David Stuckler. This is Fast Track, and we're truly international. Uh, great to see many of our regulars back today. Uh, we're a fast growing community around the world, and what I aim to provide here is a support that I wish I would have had when I was sitting where you are as an early stage researcher, when I had to muddle my way through to just figure it out for myself, making just about every mistake along the way, painfully, that you can think of. Flash forward now, I've been a professor at Harvard, Oxford, and Cambridge, and I want to pass on to you the implicit logic, the same logic that I pass on one-to-one to my mentees in these elite universities. I want to make that open access and available to everyone. If you are joining us, uh, I know for those in Australia and New Zealand, it's quite late. Uh, you're on team replay, hit like, let me know. I read and reply to every comment. We're also going to take today your video questions, and we've got an actual thesis submission from a researcher, Chris Gibson. Thanks for sharing with us that we're going to go through and apply our publishability formula to so that Chris can get clarity on how to turn his thesis into a paper. Um, before we dive in, quick tip of the week. And this one really does relate to today's session. So if you are in your thesis or you're doing a PhD by publication, I want you to already start mapping out your chapters to potential papers now and start thinking already how can I package what I'm doing up into a paper down the road? Because the moment you start thinking that this chapter could have another life, a long-term life as a paper, not just gather dust on a shelf somewhere, you start thinking differently. You start thinking about the contribution, you start building publishability from the outset rather than doing what we're going to be doing a bit today, trying to retrofit and rework things later on. So even if you've already finished and you're sitting on your thesis, that's fine. We'll work with what you have. But this tip is for those of you who are still in the thick of it. So I'm of the mindset if you want to keep the door open for an academic path, or you just want to get that proof of independent capability. Um, having papers is a feather in your cap if you're an academic, it's like money in the bank. I think every chapter should have a paper inside of it. So start seeing and planning for that now. Um, all right. I'm gonna take a second to uh mentor members. And I see I can see we got Chris with us. Hey, Chris saying I'm here and I appreciate your evaluation of thesis. Yeah, we're gonna take a look together. Let me just get some backdrop. I can see Muhammad's joining us. Hey, Mohammed, good to have you uh with us. Uh welcome back. Um uh always a pleasure. And again, uh, you have some questions along the way, drop those in the chat, and I'll take as many of those as I can in the time we have today. Uh, Jeff, I can see Jeff is back with us too. Uh, and Jeff already has some good questions, like you always do, Jeff. Uh, I'll come back to those at the end because you're right on point. I want to give you a framework for thinking about the relationship between a thesis and paper, and uh tell you some of the common problems I see, including one that Jeff, you're already anticipating of turning a thesis into a paper. So again, um yeah, this is kind of a frustrating experience because I think a lot of students feel like, well, I worked so hard on my thesis, I passed, my examiners liked it, and it just naturally follows. Well, it's publishable, so that's just the next step. I cleared the bar, they think it's great. Um, but the bar for the thesis and the bar for a journal paper, well, they're they're just different bars altogether. They're they're testing different things. So a thesis, especially at a master's level, say, is showing that you you know a bit of the field. A PhD is gonna show some contribution, at least producing at the forefront of the field. Um, so a thesis will, by its nature, say you know the literature, you know, you can handle, you can produce methods at the level of your field, uh, it's comprehensive. And you might have a very long literature review because you're having to demonstrate that you know how to do things, you're having to demonstrate mastery and demonstrate that you know the field. Where instead of paper, it's gonna be proving a point, it's gonna have a big defining message. It's gonna be like, hey, here's one thing we didn't know, and now we do, and that's it. It's gonna have a big gap, it's gonna have a contribution that addresses that gap, it's gonna have a clear message. So everything in the paper, the whole reason for existing in that paper is to address that gap that you're you're trying to fill. So structurally, what I see is three, I mean, there's more, but three big reasons why thesis chapters really struggle as papers. Uh, and Jeff has foreshadowed one of these. So the first problem is too much stuff stuffed in. And uh let me go ahead and pull up a whiteboard so we can uh we can start working through this together. Uh, I just like to get the notes up as we're kind of like deriving our framework as we go along here. Um, so the first is is the stuffing problem. So, problem one is you just got too much stuffed in, and this kind of happens. It gets packed, you might have a bunch of feedback professors like, I want you to review this theory, I want you to show me like why this method is good or why this method is bad. Um, sometimes you can have a thesis chapter could have enough stuffing for two or three papers, multiple findings, multiple angles, multiple research questions. For a research paper, that's great. Uh, sorry, for a thesis, that's great. But for a research paper, that's gonna dilute your message. Your reviewers are gonna say, well, what's what's the contribution here? What what's the novelty? This is unfocused, they're gonna get confused. So this too much stuffing problem uh is the first thing I see with theses. Uh, the second problem often is about the lit review itself. Not problem three, problem two. So the problem is the lit review. So the lit review is like an encyclopedia, it's just vast, it's way too big. And again, that's partly because you're trying to prove you know the field. Um, so think about it in a research paper, your lit reviews may be not even a thousand words, not even maybe could be 500 words, but in a thesis, your lit review might be 40 pages more. I've seen people come with me with 100-page lit reviews, which is a bit over the top, but some of them say, well, that's what my supervisor asked for, and it's a different ask. So um that that lit review is gonna have to be completely reworked, often stripped up massively. I'll come back to that. And all your lit review is supposed to do is justify the reason your study needs to exist, just kind of get to the edge of existing knowledge, show where that cliff drops off, and where you're gonna pick up and extend things. So uh it's again the the lit review in a thesis ends up in practice, I see, being quite different commonly from what's in a paper. I I prefer though, or what you're gonna see behind this, my tips is actually you can write a lit review in a way uh if you're already thinking forward to a paper down the road, you can write your literature review in a better way. That's gonna be much, much easier than trying to retrofit and do a huge surgery later on. Problem three, um, your your your framing is commonly wrong. So you're your framing uh framing is off. Um so I'm gonna say literature is huge and encyclopedic, and the framing is commonly wrong. So the thesis isn't often framed about what the research field really needs, especially at say the master's level. Um the PhD, however, is is a little bit more aligned for this. Undergrad, it's it's often not there at all. Um, so often I find that just the framing for the conversation with existing researchers at the front of the field isn't there. The framing is sometimes just too much towards examiners than to like card-carrying members of the field. Um, so so when you have this, again, there's more problems I commonly see with theses. But I if you've already done your thesis, I think you have to stop and think of this a bit as I'm not just turning my thesis into a publication, I'm doing something new. Like the paper is like the thesis is this raw source material, and the research paper I want to publish is a a new, like new house or new building altogether. Um, and and I think that will help you because it's a process of creative destruction. You're gonna have to kill some of your darlings in that thesis to create a new paper that's packaged and tidy. And I find sometimes that's hard for people because they have a bit of an emotional reaction to the thesis. I invested so much time, this is my baby, and now I'm chopping it up, and um that that's an inevitable part of the process, and sometimes a painful one. All right. So, guys, if if I'm losing any of you, ask me some questions along the way. If you're in this situation like Chris, uh, do let me know. And especially Chris, if there's something else unclear, let me uh let me know. We're gonna get to yours in a second. So, how do I look at publishability? Well, some of you guys may remember our publishability uh formula. I'm gonna put this back up here. So we put publishability as a function of the gap times the value out of your paper times the paper's own alignment uh uh is clarity and is fit. If any one of these elements is off, it's like multiplication. If your gap is zero, your publishability is gonna be zero. If the fit with a journal is zero, your publishability is gonna be zero. And you already can see one of the issues very quickly here that probably when you did your thesis, you weren't thinking at all with the fit of a journal. So you you you run into this problem sometimes where people have all these elements right here, great, but doesn't really fit any journal. And you have no publishability, even though what you did was methodologically sound, intact, your examiners loved it, but where's the fit? Where's the natural journal audience that you want to have? Um, so that this is a an issue again that commonly comes up. So we're gonna go through each of these elements. Um so let's go through one, the gap. The gap is something we spend a lot of time in fast track talking about. Um, and what I mean is is not gap to say, oh, there's not enough research on something. I I need you to take me to the cliff edge. I need you to tell me, like, are we missing, like, we've done cross-sectional studies and there's a problem of reverse causality, so we need to track people better over time to solve that chicken and egg problem. Is it that we've looked in, I don't know, before COVID and after COVID, we think things are different? Is it that there's conflicting evidence and we need to test a new theory that can help reconcile them or a new mechanism? Or that there's gotta be something you've got to have some gap that the field is gonna be really interested in. Like what is missing in the field? What do we not know that we need to know? That that's our gap. Um, so I'll put it like this. What do we not know that we need to know? Okay, it's kind of this this idea of I'll put it again here, this idea of missingness in the field. We're missing something. Um and again, some gaps are more publishable than others, not all gaps are created created equal. Um, I've often argued in this channel some uh there are multiple types of gap. One is a population gap. If you just try to say, well, you know, we haven't studied this in this you know small town in I don't know, Missouri or something. Well, why is that going to be of interest to the whole world? Um sure, you might prove something as important as a small town of Missouri, but it doesn't then you start running into the problem of, yeah, okay, there's a gap, but it's not a very big gap, and then whatever value you can add, you can fill this gap, you can fill this missingness. Just doesn't have that big value. Value, you it's harder to me for me to tell you objectively what that value is going to be. You can kind of see the value of a gap by looking at existing papers, seeing what citations they get, what kind of impact they get. Um, right, that value is not a black or white equation. And value, I mean, even going to the famous economist John Maynard Keynes, he said when it comes to value, the economists are one equation short. It's it's uh uh another conversation on how do we define how do we define value? Uh okay, so that's a gap. Number two is the value add. And I've kind of foreshadowed this already. Your value add is what are you doing? Um, how are you filling that gap? Did you actually deliver the goods? Um so like if your paper vanished tomorrow, would that gap still be there? Have you uh how have you addressed it? So this does need to line up. I do see people promising that, oh, I found a gap, but then their paper can't deliver the goods. So we need to make make sure, right, that the value is not you saying, well, I poured a lot of blood, sweat, and tears. I worked really hard, right? Unfortunately, again on this value, yes, there is a broad unit of value to your time and energy put in, but unfortunately, that's not what the market values or cares about. So in a way, it's um did you uh fill all this? Were you able to achieve and fulfill this gap? Um, and to what extent? It's right there. So uh so right there's the strength of the gap, and then some contribution to addressing this gap. You might not be able to go all the way to filling the gap. Um, but let's let's uh see this. So one of the tools we use uh in Fast Track to address this is something we call a conceptual nearest neighbor, and it always helps you to find this paper. And is the paper closest to yours? Conceptual nearest neighbor. Um and let me try to get this on the board. Is the paper closest to yours? And that will help you calibrate your gap to say, okay, well, this paper came before me, it got us to here, and I'm gonna try to get us to here, right? That difference, right? That's your value add. And sometimes that is directly the same as your gap, not always. Uh, any questions, guys? Let me know. I can see my narry's back with us. Hey, my Nary, excited about today's topic. Good to have you with us.

unknown 16:30

Mr.

SPEAKER_00 16:31

Kinsetville nearest neighbor paper. All right. Three, I'm gonna go through these a little more quickly now, uh, so we can get to questions today. Alignment. I just want to make sure your paper's internally aligned. Um that um that right, you don't have a gap and then deliver things unrelated to your gap. This is gonna especially happen if you're trying to extract from a thesis. Things just need to line up, right? Your your abstract says results that are in your discussion, your methods are explaining how you're affecting, you're acting on your research question, your gap, your discussion lines up with your value add. And especially when you're chopping and changing, alignment can go off. Reviewers and readers are gonna get confused and you'll get rejected. Uh all right, alignment clarity. Um, this is something just in general that is important. You want to assume your reviewers are dumb and make things simple and easy because so often papers get rejected because people don't understand it. So you want to make so things so simple like your grandmother can understand them if you can. Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, and we really place a premium on clarity. You're often gonna have, I mean, science is becoming more and more interdisciplinary. You can't assume everybody has insider knowledge in your field. Uh, the editors may not, in which case they may not get the value if you haven't explained why your paper isn't important, in why your paper is important in a way that everybody can understand. So, really, uh, we place a very high premium on clarity. You have to imagine your reviewer, like me, reading late at night, on a plane, your paper, maybe down a few glasses of wine, not paying close attention. And if I'm having to decipher a complex text, well, forget about it. You're gonna end up with my too difficult pile, and I'll probably be more inclined to reject something I can't easily understand than as a reviewer to do very hard yards to try to decipher it. Um, lastly, uh, like you said again, the fit. You need to have clear fit. Why is this important to this journal? Is your paper speaking to a gap in a conversation that that journal cares about? Has that journal published similar papers like yours recently? I mean, I see people who do qualitative work try to submit to a quantitative journal, and and that that's just not a good idea. They're just not publishing your kind of paper. I had somebody do an autoethnography, and they're like, I did an autoethnography for my thesis. How do I publish it? It's like, well, very few journals are publishing autoethnographies. Good luck. You're not gonna find a good journal fit here. Um, and that's not because I don't think autoethnography is important. It just you need to find a journal that will fit, and very few publish autoethnographies. Just simple fact. So um everything could be lovely, but um, good luck with the journal fit for that type of an approach and that type of method. So uh just be aware of this. If you guys are thinking about publishing your thesis one day, it really behooves you to think about these elements now and if you can get these in place. So clarity and alignment you can start working on, but certainly the elements of gap value add and having a natural journal audience, you need to have on your mind. Okay, all right, this is the first step. So, guys, on your paper, I want you to run this publishability formula, and we're gonna look at this uh coming up later on Chris's actual thesis to see where that falls. All right, step two of the process, and this is gonna build off a live session I did with Jocelyn Clark, who was the uh editor for a while of The Lancet and later the BMJ. So we'll call this kind of step one uh run a publishability audit on your paper. And uh so step two here of converting your thesis to a publication is I want you to find one main contribution. Like, think about your elevator message. What is your paper's main one-line uh message, like your elevator pitch that you're gonna have? And this is really what Jocelyn, uh the editor, uh, recommended. And when we asked her what's the biggest mistake she sees in submissions, she says it's that the message, the defining message of the paper is not clear. And uh the way she said it, a little bit different for me. She said, Look, can you tell your auntie on a walk in the park in one sentence what your paper's about and why it matters? And if you can't do that, you're not really ready to package this up. For a thesis, this is gonna be especially hard because your thesis, again, probably has that too much stuffing problem going on that I mentioned earlier. So you're gonna have to strip out these single tidy packages. You can imagine how you're gonna have to strip this out single tidy packages with a gap, a value add, everything aligned, clarity, and that that's speaking to the journal. One message, and that might mean splitting your paper, your thesis into multiple papers. And in your instinct, and the instinct is in research is well, all this is important. I have to include all of it. That's the feeling. You don't. In fact, that's what's gonna get you rejected. And sometimes some of those less important details are going to distract or take away from your good stuff. So, again, editors see hundreds of papers, they're having trouble finding reviewers. They need to be able to sift out what your paper's saying right away. If it's muddy, it's just gonna get desk reject. They have an incentive to desk reject you because it's so hard to find reviewers, they don't want to take papers forward now unless they think it has a chance of getting through. Um, so the exercise for you in step two is uh is really to come. Of clarify, well, what again the publishability audit for funding your paper's main contribution is kind of just be able to answer your question. What did we not know before? What do we know now because of your work? Um, just make sure you've got clarity on this. You can't unless you have this clarity, you're not going to be able to take a thesis and could convert it into a paper effectively. Um if you're struggling here, it's likely it's likely that you've got multiple contributions. And I want you to parse them out and think of what are the highest highest value contributions. Find your highest value contribution and make that your first paper. So you know, spend more time thinking and planning before writing. Get this main one-line message down. That's going to be a bit of a north star for your paper before going too far. I want to take a breath and uh in and check. And I can see uh buddy uh Leon is joining. Hey Leon, good to see you here with us. Leon saying, Do you even go high-level bro? Uh Leon, you always make me laugh, man. Good to see you. I know it's late where you are. And uh Chris is saying, This is good. I was not thinking publishability in doing my thesis. I do know a couple closely related papers. Excellent, Chris. So, yeah, I'm glad you're already thinking about that. We're gonna look at that later as we go through your thesis. Um, I think we've covered Jeff's questionnaire. Jeff says, since a thesis is much longer than a typical paper, is there a vague rule of thumb about how many papers say a hundred-page master's thesis in the social sciences might turn into? There's no rule of thumb. It could be zero, it could be ten. It depends on these steps. Can you strip out the contributions? Vague rule of thumb, hard to say. Vague rule of thumb, I'd say most master theses are not publishable. So vague rule of thumb is zero publishability because people didn't follow these steps before doing their master's thesis. And it's a shame. And they often will come to me and be like, I've got this thesis. I I don't need to go through the beginner steps in your program. I don't need to learn the basics or fundamentals of publishing because I already did a thesis and I got a good grade on it. Um, and those are hard conversations to have because it's often a big reality check for people that they've worked hard, they've poured blood, sweat, and tears into something that's not publishable. And if you have aspirations to go from the master's to the PhD, it really makes sense to get this right because you're doing all this hard work with just a few simple tweaks. Oftentimes, you can turn something, the same amount of work that you're putting in, you can get that full payoff of something publishable. And people on my channel, when we did the poll and survey, you can see it if you go into our community posts on my channel. Um, we asked how much is a publication worth to you, to your career. And you guys, my viewers, are broad cross-section of people in the field. So it's about as representative of the target audience as we want here. Um, so as imperfect as a self-reported poll is, and uh over half came up with it's either worth more than $5,000 or it's priceless. Others said the amount was smaller, maybe uh between a thousand and five thousand. Some said less than a thousand, that's okay. It depends on your field and if you're going down an academic path. But if those of you are in fields thinking about actively publishing, thinking about becoming an academic or researcher yourself, uh, it really is no exaggeration. It's it's like money in the bank. And just going through the whole process to get from thesis to publication is transformational. You'll come out the other side of it a different person. It's like having a superpower, being able to publish. To go from your idea to something that is out there in the world, respected by your field, taken seriously, to becoming a published researcher, um, is something you'll be forever proud of. Um, so okay, Jeff, let me know if that's answered your question, though. Convoluted answer here, but um glad you asked that. All right, step three. This is the hard part. This is the creative destruction part, and this is this is the ruthless part. So if you got that main contribution, bang, now we can go to step three creative destruction. Yes, I'm stealing the term from the economist Schumpeter, um, but that's what we're dealing with here. It's emotionally difficult. You almost have to take a machete to your thesis and chop it up. And again, don't think of it as you're like renovating your house. You are building a new house. If you try to think of it as, ah, I just want to trim a little bit off the top, I want to maybe redo the windows here, there in my house. I'm doing a remod, you're gonna preserve too much. You're gonna try, oh, I like this paragraph, all this sentence just flows trippingly off the tongue. Just get rid of it, right? The sentiment here is gonna be the enemy of your publishability. So that phrase, kill your darlings. I'll put on the board. Um, is really gonna be guarded by this and think of it as um building a new paper um rather than remodeling an existing one. So, how are you gonna do this? So, we're gonna do this in some substeps. So, first, first, we're gonna um we're just gonna strip out the huge lit review. That that's kind of the easiest thing to do. Um, sometimes you'll have graduate material that like I can think of an example. Okay, this will be a bit technical. In uh maybe in stats, you use robust standard errors. Maybe for the thesis, you go explain. This is why you use robust standard errors. This is why I use this kind of regression model. Well, oftentimes you'll just have that in, you might have pages devoted to that in your thesis, uh, but in the research paper, might not even be there at all. Maybe just a citation. Might just be following X, Y, and Z. We use robust standard errors, that's it. Where your examiners might want to see you do some elaborate discussion on why you chose this method of standard errors and not that. And why didn't you bootstrap them or do this or that? You're gonna strip out some of this grad school type writing. Um, so when you strip it out as well, it's gonna be compact. All your literature review is going to do is you're just gonna be make a case for why your study needs to exist. Anything that does not pertain to making a case for why your study needs to exist uh needs to go in the bin. That's a lot of cutting. Follow that principle, it's gonna help a lot. All right. Second, you need to isolate your core findings. And so I like making something that I like to call a result set. It's just kind of your core results. So kind of isolate your core results or something called result set. And so almost the story of your paper in tables and figures. So often I remember my PhD thesis, I maybe have like 110 tables and figures. I had to strip that out and make okay, this paper, this message has this set of tables and figures. This paper has this set of tables and figures. So I made a result set that tells a story, the meet, the evidence of the paper in the tables and figures. So you're doing quant work, tables, figures, qualitative work. This might be your main quote set. Um, depending on what kind of evidence you have, your experiment, same thing, tables, figures. Um, get a hold of that. Because right now in your thesis, you probably have this huge data dump. Uh, but that's gonna be intellectual landfill. You could put some stuff in supplementary material, that's okay. But I need that main finding, the store of your paper, to be able to be impossible to miss in in the exhibits that you're gonna show. All right. Um, we work kind of inside out in the paper. So then what I like to do is just kind of follow our standard writing inside out method. Once you have this, um, you're gonna go section by section and you're gonna go kind of update the refresh methods, make it following all the principles. You can find this on my channel on the how to write a paper, step-by-step playlist, how to write the methods, how they then go through the results, make sure it's line up the results as discussion, and then find you the introduction. Um, I won't go through all these principles here, but that that's the order I recommend of conversion. Um, and then and then finally, kind of somewhere in between the discussion and interest, sometimes tuck in the abstract here. Um it really helps you. The abstract's a mini snapshot of your paper. So the abstract's very important for helping see things are aligned. You should be able to read the top line of your discussion and see that that fits with your conclusion and results in the abstract. Your introduction should fit with a background of your abstract section. Um, I won't get too far into that. We've got other live sessions going through how to write these things even better inside our mentorship communities, but just wanted to uh make you aware of that. Again, you're extracting the diamond nuggets from all this roughage that you have in your paper. Um, and the pieces you cut, don't worry, they concede the next paper. Doesn't mean just put them in a graveyard file for now and pick them up later. All right, finally, finally, finally. You've stuck now, you're ready to rebuild for the journal. I think this stage uh is helpful to think about probably here as well, but now you're gonna specifically start formatting uh for for the journal. So rebuild for the journal. Let's make this rebuild. Um, fit is the final component. So you need to do your homework on the journal. So we have other training on finding the right journal for your paper that you can find on my channel. Uh, encourage you to check that out. But go look at your target journal. Have they published similar papers? Do you cite some of those papers from that journal in your own paper? Are they interested in in what you're doing? So you need evidence of fit. And uh, not just like, oh, this sounds like this journal has a good title, seems good. You need to make sure do they publish your methods, right? What's the recent what's the most recent paper using your methods on your topic that they published? Um, so let me put that on here because I think that will help you. Um find the most recent paper on your topic using your method uh they've published. Ah right? And you're like, whoa, oh Professor Secker, I can't find anything using my method. Well, good luck publishing there, right? British Medical Journal will not take qualitative papers, for example. They might have published on something you're interested in, but if they haven't used your method, it's gonna be hard. So if they haven't published on your topic, or if they haven't published using your method, it's gonna be a harder sell as a fit. If they've done both, it's much more likely they're gonna be open and interested in what you're doing. Um, so some of you, by the way, rebuilding for the journal, don't even have a publication strategy, don't even have a publishing plan over one, two, five years. Um, so if you haven't taken that step to build your own personal intellectual roadmap, you got a problem. Because think about athletes who are serious about athletics, they have a training plan, a nutrition plan, they have goals, they have milestones to see, if they're making progress. Think about it, if you're running a mile, you have a time you're trying to hit. You guys are trying to be professionals publishing papers, and you don't have a roadmap plan. How do you know if you're doing it right or not? What are your own internal benchmarks to define success or failure? Um, there's just a level of kind of professionalism that you've got to approach this with. And unfortunately, people are just expected to figure it out, and they don't always get the best examples from uh their own faculty in a field. Um, so um let me zoom in a little bit so you guys can see this. And uh prof, do you need approval of uni to convert your thesis to a paper once? No, not at all. Not at all. Sometimes it depends on your relationship with your supervisor, they may or may not want to be co-authors. So I definitely would check that before going too far. The rest of the journal on cover letter, we've got training on introduction, all this stuff. You can find that on my channel. So I don't want to go through too far in helping you uh implement or execute this yourself. But these are the steps. Once you've done that, then you can go through a training to submit like a pro, like you've done it thousands of times before. So, with that, with that, guys, I want to uh have a look. Let me uh share a different screen. I want to look at Chris's thesis. And and Chris, as we've been chatting here, um I imagine I'm intentionally gonna look fresh at your thesis so that we can try to do a little bit of an audit uh together ourselves of it. But Chris, yeah, as you've been following along, any initial thoughts or reactions um given what you know now? I'm kind of curious what you think about your paper in light of our publishability formula. That's the first thing I'm gonna look for. So we're gonna go through all those elements of the publishability formula and look at Chris's thesis. By the end, I'm gonna uh help Chris see which steps he can take. We're not gonna get all the way through step four of the journal fit, but we'll probably be thinking about what journal will be the right fit for Chris uh today. Um so um Mineris says, is there any similarities problem for turn it in later? Well, if there is, it I mean it's your own thesis, it's a master's thesis, so it's not a big, it's not a big deal. I I've never come across this as an issue. Um so uh and Chris, I can see you got the right spirit here. You're pragmatic, not sentimental. And you can think of two recent papers to refer to. So I'm not sure I follow you. Do you you're saying you've got two papers you think you can do out of your thesis, or I'm I'm not entirely sure. Um I'm not 100% sure I I catch your drift there, but I think you're trying to say something important. Are you are these two nearest neighbor papers you're thinking of? Or uh yeah, yeah, maybe maybe share that with me. But let's pull up Chris's thesis and and Chris, thank you so much for being willing and open to share this with us. I'm gonna flip the screen here so this is maybe a little bit bigger. Let me try to zoom in. Okay. All right, so we've got a we are looking at here a doctoral project that is a qualitative study of students' perceptions of mental health services. Okay, cool. Um, so that I mean we already know the type of method, but we're just gonna be here. I mean, even with this, we could probably figure out which journals are gonna be interested. Um, let's look at the abstract here. So uh let me zoom in, guys, more so you don't go blind. Actually, you know what? I'm gonna try to change my screen here. Let's do it like this. Now you can see a little bit better. Okay. Purpose of this uh qualitative study. Okay, mental health uh concerns among college students is a problem. Yep, that's part of why we exist. However, help seeking behaviors if not increase the same rate as availability. Okay, good. And the study addressed three research questions. Cool. All right, so publishability. So gap, right? So even here, I'm looking at the gap. Let's see what you found. All right, I'm looking at this. This looks like one paper to me. It looks like one paper, not multiple papers based on what I'm reading. I'll go through more, but the interviews with 18 students and the finding themes, this reads like one paper. Uh, 18 students, just in general, on publishability, just for your methods alignment, is thin. So this is this is not great. Um, doesn't mean it's not publishable, but it's going to put you at the lower prospects for publishing, just because it's a small number, it's a quite small number. Um, it's a private college in Midwest US. You're gonna run into problems that private colleges is really gonna be representative. This is gonna be interested of interest, maybe to the S maybe wider. Uh, you you're pitching it wider, which I think is good, but um people will question is that really representative of student experiences? What's unclear is what are you what are you adding here to knowledge? So publishability, remember the first element is the the gap. So you haven't really said the gap. You said the help seeking behaviors haven't increased. Okay. Well, is it that they haven't been studied? We don't know why they're not increasing. What's the what's the issue here? So I the gap's not coming out clearly. So I'm gonna look a little bit deeper in the paper for the gap. Because without the gap, I can't really calibrate the value added. So, like if you found these things, but other people found those things too. Well, what's the value add? Remember in the publishability formula, this here it's that what right what I said on your paper's main contribution. What did we not know before? What do we now know because of your work? So, did we not know this before? I'm not sure. I'm not sure. Maybe this is new, but this is written kind of vague. Service availability. Um but kind of your whole premise was that these services are rising, but help seeking isn't keeping up. So it sounds like there's a glut of resources that just aren't being used. So the framing of the paper is a bit off in terms of publishability, and a big weakness here is just too few students. So my blunt assessment, uh uh, my blunt assessment is this is gonna be a bit of a challenge. Let's look at those. So, Chris, you said you've got two neighbor papers. That's fantastic. So you've got to calibrate on those, and I'd be citing them right away. I mean, I think your contribution could be to say that you used a new model that offer, but why is this model so helpful and going over and above what others have done? That would make this a whole lot stronger. If you specify the gap in here, and then why this model is gonna break ground and add value to that gap in the way the other studies couldn't do, and you need to calibrate it to those neighbor papers. Let me see if in your introduction, let me just see your outline. So, this is often a beast, and this is what I'm talking about overview of the ah, here we go. Lit review. Okay, this is actually a great example. Look at this lit review, page 21 to 75. This is all gonna turn into 500 words, less, depending on the journal you're gonna target. Now, those nearest neighbor papers, Chris, are gonna help you to calibrate which journal, which will help you know how much space you have in the paper that you can allocate towards the lit review. Also, same thing, methods. You can see this method 78 to 93. I mean, your method is the same. It's gonna be a thousand words, not even. It's gonna be massively stripped down to the bare bones, um, keeping it as linear as possible. So things like I can see participants instruments data collection. This is not looking very linear to my eye, um, just off your outline. But yeah, this is uh this looks like one paper, maybe. And checking your nearest neighbors, you need to check the journals if they have published using as few as 18 interviews, because that that's something I'm really concerned about in just terms of the publishability of your paper. I'm in that's that's the value add. So there could be a gap, but if they say, well, the value add with 18 in a small private college, we're not sure that's filled the gap. That doesn't speak that well to the gap. Um, that's really hurting your publishability uh formula result. Um, thanks for sharing this with us. I hope this helps. Uh so I won't go through the massive strip down, but I I would be inclined to do radical surgery here. But before doing that, before writing, before editing, before building this new house, um get clarity on the gap and value out of your paper, calibrate, already start thinking about the journal, make sure there's a good fit there, and uh go through steps, steps one and two, um, like uh I outlined here, which is just to repeat those. So, step one, run the full publishability audit. Step two, find the main contribution. Um, what did we not know before? What do we know now because of your work? Find your papers, one-line message, which I don't see yet, and um do your homework on journal fit. Um so kind of make a case of why you've got three to five journals that are gonna be a great fit. My sense is you can get it published, but I think you're gonna be going down tiers to tier three or tier four. And it's a bit unfortunate, Chris. So, because I think with some planning at the outset, maybe say you could have done 10 more interviews. Maybe you could have done some interviews at a neighboring university or something. Or small little tweaks that could have boosted your publishability a bit more. Not impossible, not impossible, but I think hindsight's always 2020. I think with the benefit of some of this knowledge, you might have been able to reframe the thesis in some ways, doing the same thing that you're doing now, that could have aided the publishability a bit. So don't lose heart. It's all part of the experience of growing and on the journey in getting stronger as a researcher. But I would on this one, one paper, aim for a tier three, tier four, get it out, get it on a review, quickly move on to the next. Thank you again so much for sharing this with us. All right, guys, at this point, I'm gonna turn to your wider questions. We have another question that came uh in this week, and I'm gonna pop this in the chat. This is something that is about lit reviews. Somebody has asked here, Prof. David, regarding systematic reviews. Could you clarify what Prospero is and whether it is essential to register a review before or after conducting it? Okay. So uh for those of you guys who are new, systematic review is a special type of literature review that is like a lit review on steroids. Um, it is uh strong, it's robust, it's kind of core evidence in the field because it does a lit review in a reproducible way. So it says, I search for these articles using these words, I found these, I threw these ones back, I had these now with these, I did this analysis step by step all the way through the process. That's why they're used um to inform life and death decisions in medicine. They form the basis of medical guidelines. And odds are when you go to a doctor to get treated for something, or maybe now to an AI to get treated for something, they are building off guidelines that were built on systematic reviews. Now, what is Prospero and why it's important? Prospero is a pre-registration system. So uh there's been problems with people doing a study, not getting the answers they like, fiddling around with the methods, doing it again, and reporting it, publishing it as if that was the original idea all along. But that is inherently less trustworthy, less reliable because the researchers have fiddled around with it to get the result they want. The solution everybody came up with to stop this is handcuffing yourself, saying, I'm gonna do this method, registering the method before you do the study. So I want you to understand what Prospero represents, because Prospero represents this deeper effort to stamp out the problems of poor reproducibility in the field of bad science by telling people chain yourself, have confidence in your methods to chain yourself to them so you can't fiddle around with the results later. So when somebody pre-registers, if they ever have to deviate from what they said they were gonna do, they need to explain why. So you know, the journal, the editors will ask questions did you deviate from your protocol? Did you deviate from your pre-registration? Why? And there needs to be a valid reason, defensible reason for doing so. So let me share my screen and show you guys uh what Prospero looks like because I think you'll find that insightful. Um, and that is a perfect expression of this. I think all fields need this, uh, need to move this way, but it's come out first in medicine because the stakes of getting evidence right is so high. So it is exactly this. So it's as Prospero. What is Prospero? It's an international systematic review registry that aims to promote transparency and open science. Oh dare, sorry guys. Uh, to reduce reporting bias and help prevent unintended duplication and research waste. So, yeah, this is another benefit. Predant uh unintended duplication research waste. That's another benefit, but this this is here, this reporting bias, i.e., bad science, fiddling around with stuff. Um, and and this transparency is always a good thing in science. Uh I always recommend airing on the side of transparency. We now uh require randomized controlled trials to be pre-registered as well. And again, I'd like to see this more and more in science. It's just good practice. So um, yeah, you need to do this if you are if you have a health-related outcome, you need to do this. If you don't, it's not necessary. So that's the short answer to your question. Um, long answer is why are we actually doing this? And what does this mean for the future of science? Um, so thank you for asking that. And uh hope hope that uh clears things up for you. And uh, we got some thank yous. So, Chris saying thanks for looking at the paper, and not just you, Chris, when you share your paper, everybody benefits from it. That's the true spirit of community, and and that spirit of open science I was referring to a moment ago. My Nary says too, thanks, Chris, for sharing your thesis. And that's something I love inside our fast track communities where where we do have private workshops um like this five times a week, um, because people help each other and people learn from each other. That's that's the whole enterprise and spirit of research collaboration. Uh and Jeff is is one of our awesome members there. So Jeff is saying, uh, can a literature gap simply be that while there are one or more publications on the topic in the regional language, the research is in a cultural historical area, but no published research in English? Huh. So if you're just saying what's already been said in the regional language in English, then it's just a translation. So there's not really any scientific value added there. I'm not sure I fully follow. I think what you're suggesting though is that it's gonna be more than a translation, but why wouldn't you just translate the journal article that's already been published into English then? So I don't really see that necessarily as being fully valuable. I mean, imagine a randomized trial was done on a drug and published in Spanish, and then that same randomized controlled trial was done in English as a replication. I mean, all the credit would go to the Spanish one, right? So, and especially now with AI translation, language differences are being flattened. If people don't know it exists, well, yeah, I mean, it's a problem. I mean, you publish papers in low-tiered journals and it might as well not exist sometimes. They they just get buried. Remember, the median citation of papers after two years is zero. So that that is the default result. Um, so just because people don't know it exists, well, that's a marketing problem. That's not a that's not a scientific problem. So now I I don't think that just just translation is enough value um to be added here. Uh Sally, hey, good to have you join us. Um we went through our publishability formula and mapped out a four-step plan for converting a thesis into papers. And uh, if you want to go watch the replay, we went through Chris Gibson's helpful submission of his thesis about how to go through that process himself. Uh, all the good, the bad, the ugly. Um, check it out on the replay. If you're on team replay, let me know, guys. Hit like here. That really helps the algorithm reach people who it finds who are like you, who might just need to hear some of these tips. Sally asked, can I cite or include articles from controversial journals like MDPI Frontiers as their information is useful? Uh, yes, I would not be quoting from scam journals like predatory journals, but these are on the borderline. So, yeah, I mean, a lot of researchers don't like them, but we're stuck with them. Um, they go through some modicum of peer review. So I would, I mean, remember, people also cite gray literature. The point in citation is being yourself a savvy consumer of the quality of what you're citing, but people will cite news articles, people will cite all sorts of stuff, depending on how they're deploying it. So I don't know what exactly you're citing. If you're citing it as part of a debate, that's fine. If you're citing it as this robust method that everybody uses and is rocksaulted in the field, uh, maybe not. So depends on on how you're citing it. But people cite unpublished things all the time. I I would stay away from citing predatory journals, just partly out of ethics. But um, yeah. Uh then you can see uh and Sally is in in our mentorship communities. I see that my nearest neighbor systematic review paper mentioned articles on Frontiers about virtual teens, which I also find them highly cited. Yeah, and that's a good sign. When your nearest neighbor paper is highly cited, that's a good sign, especially if it's in a journal in Frontiers that's not creme de la creme in the field, and it's still got highly cited. It just shows you the power of the topic, can it can be much more powerful than the strength of the overall journal. And you'll see good papers get published in not so good journals, but they still get picked up. It's like the the cream rises to the top, and this does happen with papers. So this goes back, Jeff, to a moment ago when you're saying, Oh, well, you know, well, they just don't know about it because it does they don't know it exists because it hasn't been translated. Yeah, but you know what? If it's really good research in the field, it's gonna get picked up, it's gonna get talked about. It does find its way. In this case here, even uh maybe not in a high impact journal, impact factor journal, still got picked up, still highly cited. And Sally, that's a good sign for you that your area is likely to have better publishability because you can forecast your impact by seeing that your nearest neighbor paper is doing well. That gives you some indication that your paper will do well too. Again, I commonly say the closest correlate of your success is going to come from the success of the paper similar to yours. Similarly, I mean you can apply this principle to merit many areas of life, right? The closest correlate to your success with your PhD supervisor is gonna be the success of his other PhD students. If you go to a PhD supervisor who has a consistent track record of placing all his students into assistant professorships at Harvard, unless you're the black sheep, your odds are looking pretty good that you're gonna follow on that well-trodden path. Um, so worth worth noting. Um, thanks for asking that question, Sally. It's a really good one. Guys, we are coming to the end. I hope I have not missed that we've gotten a lot of we've gotten a bunch of questions here. So let me see if these will pop up. Yeah, you can see we've got a whole bunch of questions that I've been scanning through here. And so I hope I haven't missed anything. Um just scanning back through. And guys, I check and respond, I read and reply to every comment that does come through. So if I've missed any of yours or you're on team replay, let me know. And if you are interested in working together in a more close, intimate capacity or joining some of the lovely folks in our community, like Jeff and Sally, who are here. Uh, we'd love to have you with us if you're a good fit. You can check out some of the links on my channel to see if our approach to research resonates. If you feel like it would be a good fit, then uh take the next steps. And if you apply on site, it'll help find what is the best pathway for you to get the right support you need and get help and support as early as today. Um, I do not want any researcher out there just being stuck going in circles, trying to figure it out for them on their own too long. Or even worse, what I see, many get themselves in a confused disarray with AI that as good as AI is, is not able to calibrate things scientifically yet. That may change in the future. Uh, it's good at doing things that that machines can do, can sift through a large bunch of information in a very short period of time and help pull out themes and patterns, but spotting gaps, spotting strengths of contributions, assessing value, um, is not going to be as good uh in doing so. So um, yeah, I hope that helps. As a side curiosity, Chris, you might take ask an AI to run our publishability formula against your thesis and see what it comes out as. One thing, one way we do like to use AI is as a critical uh friend to try to anticipate reviewer objections and weaknesses. And uh, oh hey, yeah, and there you are. Good to see you pop into the chat. Uh, thanks for dropping in. I always love when you guys show up to the YouTube sessions as well. Um, I'll be doing this coming week another topic triage session to help people lock in on their topic. So look forward to seeing you guys in that. And thanks for joining today. Guys, I am off. It is uh whatever your religion or beliefs. Uh, for us here, I'm in Italy at the moment. It is Easter. So I'm going to take a refreshing break. Hope many of you will do the same over the weekend. Uh, breaks really are activating, so give yourself permission to let your subconscious breathe a little bit. Uh, that's you'll notice when you're walking in nature or in a park, that's sometimes when you get your best ideas. Uh, so give yourself that gift uh of that restorative time. And I will look forward to seeing you next week, same place, same time, every week. If you do want to participate, you've made it this far, submit your video question here. And I'll leave that QR code up for a second. You can scan that in, it'll take you to a form link. And you'll see, every week I answer your questions. Get my personal feedback here. And if you want to join uh Jeff and Union, and sorry if I got your name wrong there, I've got a little QR code up here. That's for our research collective, it's our most powerful starting point. I I highly recommend it. Um, and it's just it's a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun to work with a powerful international community, interdisciplinary of people who are all trying to be the best researchers that can be. I I really I wish I would have had this when I was starting out. Um, but all right, guys.