Dear Martin Aluga

I think that it is accepted idea. The first line of defense of the higher-education student is his/her published work.

Regards

Yes, if the previously written thesis containing the results of the research has not been published, it can be divided into parts, which, after adapting to the editorial requirements of a specific journal, will be published in this journal as a series of articles presenting the results of specific scientific research.

Greetings,

Dariusz Prokopowicz

I published 4 journal articles out of my dissertation. I used a mixed method approach, and presenting the findings as one article was simply impossible. However, you need to clearly differentiate between the purpose of each article and report on the data from different perspectives. Best to use different data for each publication. And if you are using the same data, you will need to disclose this in the article and the cover letter to the EIC.

Each case is individual. Again, nothing unethical in the approach as long as there is no duplication involved.

It is blatantly obvious that you either write a monograph, or a series of shorter articles, together with, I presume, an introduction in order to describe the thoughts behind the set-up, and a summary. If none of your manuscripts are already submitted for publication, you can do that whenever you like.

The same thing goes if you were to have written an entire monograph - as I did - in which case you might cut it up into shorter articles, or publish an update of the PhD dissertation as a monograph - as I did.

You have lots of options! :-)

I entirely agree with the comments so far. The essential issue is that you acknowledge any previous publication of parts of the overall work (say as book chapters, or methods descriptions, or literature review etc etc.) when you publish another article/chapter etc on a particular aspect of the study, the way it changes the questions that should be asked in the general field and so on. It is your work and you can publish about it in any way you like providing you alert the reader to any prior publication and acknowledge the contribution of others to the work, especially if significant or specific. Let the editors of the publishing journal decide whether a submitted article has something new to say or something worthwhile to the readers of that particular journal that they might not otherwise get to see.

In my view, you can publish a monograph and then publish articles based on parts of it, especially if they are communicating to new audiences, articles linking your work to others, or drawing out additional implications not hitherto written about in the main thesis - providing, of course, that copyright is observed . These articles may have similar introductions and contain summaries of previously published work providing the main part of the article has something new to say or something that applies the work to a new field or audience. Again, acknowledgement of the purpose of each piece is the key. Your peers will soon tell you if you are repeating yourself too much!

Yes, thesis works often come with more than one objective, where in most cases each objective is expected to be an independent paper. In addition, graduate requirements in several international universities usually mention the minimum number of publications expected from one's dissertation. Besides, I have 2 journal articles published from my master's thesis so far, and most of my colleagues have published more than 5 articles from their PhD dissertation. So, as long as each paper is independent and abiding by ethical rules, it is rewarding to split, reanalyze, and have more papers published from one's thesis/dissertation.

It depends on the journal. Read the fine print.

In reality, yes you can. However, it creates an uneven playing field in the hypercompetitive world of academia, perpetuating a flawed reward system that is about quantity rather than quality.

Ibham Veza I think participating in academia itself perpetuates 'a flawed reward system that is about quantity over quality.' Academic positions are scarce, and often decided based on quantity, rather than quality. Scientific inquiry would be better - generally speaking - if we all refrained from attempting to 'create an uneven playing field', but few have, say, the financial resources to refrain from participating in this flawed system once they've set it as a career path.

This is not meant to suggest I think misleading publishing tactics are ethically permissible. I do not. I only want to recognize the difficulty faced by academics. That said, I think several steps can be taken to avoid unethical publishing, and the answers offered here by Dariusz Prokopowicz , Michael Patriksson , and Alexander Serenko offer distinct, helpful, guidance in this complicated landscape.

I think that...Yes!

Yes it is allowed, since you might not be able to present all in a simple publication. What I did was to split 4 objectives into 2 different articles. It can be done that way

When I got my PhD (over 40 y ago) the expectation was that it had enough in it to produce 3-5 papers. Of course, your field might differ from that era's math/stat field - your supervisor should be the best person to advuse you about splitting and target journal(s).

There some drawbacks to not splitting, which can limit the choice of referees for the editor, and thus delay getting something out there.

Whilst I am not clear about some details (like time delay and who digitizes), many Canadian universities deposit their theses with the national archives and those that are digiized are online via:

https://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/services/theses/Pages/theses-canada.aspx

I don't know what your university makes available on-line for outsiders, like your prospective employer, but you might consider getting your dept to host your thesis online.

The last paper I published was 16 p long. The average length in the current issue of that journal was 15.6 pages - this seems pretty typical.

Anecdotedly, I did once submit a paper that was nearly 60 p long, and 2 of the 3 referees suggested splitting it into the 3 natural subcases. I wasn't pleased with that, and wrote to the editor, saying that if he wanted 3 stand-alone papers, each with a title page, abstract, introduction, preliminary lemata and biblio. it would easily add 5 pages each to the 2 new parts. I said that whilst I could easily do this within a week and resubmit the papers, I thought it was rather a waste of time and journal pages, and would rather withdraw the paper than do this. The editor wrote back and said he'd spoken with the referees, and they would accept the single paper, provided I dealt with their other comments satisfactorily.

NB You mught well not run into such a reasonable editor, and the next editor could well ask some of these same referees to referee for the new chosen journal.

Dear Martin Aluga, there is nothing unethical when a PhD thesis provides sufficient interesting results for a number of publications. In our field of research (chemistry) this is instead rather normal. In the past, we had PhD theses of my co-workers that contained enough material for 8-10 publications (e.g. the thesis by Farid M. Sroor cited below). It is just very important that the work is not fragmented and every publication has a "full story".

Thesis Synthesis, structure, and catalytic activity of new lanthani...

The theses in civil engineering that I supervised were all paper-based and as such are intended to be published separately. We often had MS and PhD students defend their theses with one or more of the papers already accepted for publication by top tier journals. What better proof to the thesis committee of the validity and contribution of the research!!

What I find unethical is the practice of trying to publish the literature review from a thesis as original research in a single paper.

Dear Martin Aluga, I fully agree with all points outlined by Douglas D. Gransberg. This is the prefect answer to your question, and I could not say it any better. This is exactly how we always try to handle it.

Yes, this is a good practice. I always encourage students to plan publishing papers in top tier journals ahead of their defense.

Definitely a good practice. But in case where one does a PhD without having published previously, one does not need encouragement. It is obligatory to publish first........

Ahmed Elyamany and Hrvoje Vučemilović I fully agree with you. However, this is not only the responsibility of the PhD student. It also requires a supervisor who is willing to write the respective papers in a timely manner.

Dear Martin Aluga

I think that it is accepted idea. The first line of defense of the higher-education student is his/her published work.

Regards

Dear Martin,

Yes, it's possible. Some of my colleagues published up to 3-4 articles based on their Ph.D works. Some of the articles are co-authored, some of them are single-authored. At least one of the articles is usually co-authored by a PhD supervisor.

So good luck with publications!

Best regards,

Tatiana

Tatiana Garanina I partially agree with you. If a PhD thesis contains plenty of interesting results, it is not only ethical but advisable to publish several papers describing these results. However (at least in our field of research: chemistry) it is very unusual that PhD students publish single-author papers without naming their PhD supervisor. In my opinion the PhD supervisor should always be the corresponding author, because he / she conceived the research, organized the research funding and wrote the paper.

Yes, this has been practised by many people. An article in a journal is limited by length and a PhD thesis has many aspects that cannot be confined to such length. Having the supervisor as a co-author adds value to the article though we need to follow the standard practise of priority in authorship of the article, and a corresponding author.

Chung Tin Fah I fully agree with you. Normally PhD theses have a number of different aspects and sub-sections, so that it is advisable to publish severals different papers containing the results of the thesis.

Hi Martin,,

I suggest that you exploit your thesis research to a maximum level possible. Typically, all collected data can be re-used in different ways, so you can take advantage of the hard work invested in the thesis by producing multiple publications.

Meliha

Dear Martin,

It is absolutely OK to split it if you properly designed your thesis. I succeeded to publish 3-4 articles from my thesis thanks to properly defined model and variables.

Good luck!

Regards,

Nedim