How to Publish Your PhD: A Practical Guide for the Humanities and Social Sciences, and: Publishing from Your PhD: Negotiating a Crowded Jungle (review)

Although one function of the earliest university presses in North America —established over 130 years ago—was publication of the theses and dissertations of their host institutions' own students, fulfilling the widely held condition that doctoral work completed at US and Canadian institutions be published is now essentially handled by ProQuest Information and Learning (formerly University Microfilms International), which processes over 70,000 theses and dissertations each year. ¹ Graduate students at most US and Canadian institutions simply complete a form, perhaps pay a nominal processing fee, and submit—electronically—their departmentally and institutionally approved theses and dissertations to the company. Et voilà, the work is published! Why, then, the need for these two works on converting dissertations into publications, especially given the presence of such time-tested books on the topic by the likes of William Germano, Beth Luey, and others? ² In short, the issue of dissertation and thesis publication is more complicated: ProQuest is not ubiquitous; submitted works are not assigned ISBNs; copyright works in various ways; ³ and many individuals and institutions do not consider the works really published in the first place, even if electronic copies may be downloaded or hard copies ordered. In that sense ProQuest is more a repository and duplicating service, akin to services provided by numerous archives of electronic theses and dissertations around the world. And most scholars and researchers I know do not routinely peruse these databases for new scholarship (though doing so is certainly a way to stay abreast of new voices and developments): They wait to read it—or, often in the case of scholarly books, about it via reviews—in their disciplinary journals and other venues. ⁴

One reason for avoiding theses and dissertations in their 'raw' form is that their genre-particular purposes (argumentation, the showcasing of knowledge) and markers (excessive citation, signposting) can obscure their contributions to knowledge. Hence, in what I feel is more an ethical imperative than simply a choice of convenience or instrumentality, the results of thesis and dissertation research should be disseminated beyond the empires of electronic repositories. Doing so requires not only effort but also knowledge that, for many recent graduate students, is likely not obvious. Here is where books such as these two slim volumes can come in handy.

As someone who recently completed a PhD in the social sciences, I happen to be a member of the target audience for both books. The books display notably different perspectives: Sarah Caro's are those befitting an Anglo-European editor (she has worked for both Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press in England), and Nicola Johnson's are those of an antipodean faculty member (she is a senior lecturer in teacher education at Monash University, Australia). Caro's book seems filled with expert advice—she has seen things from the 'other side,' so to speak. Johnson's is more personal and anecdotal; her readers are treading territory similar to that which she herself quite recently trod (her PhD was conferred in 2008). Not surprisingly, then, the books employ different approaches, and they do so with different levels of success.

Even though her last piece of advice is 'Don't forget to have fun' (132), Sarah Caro is all business in her How to Publish Your PhD: A Practical Guide for the Humanities and Social Sciences. Addressed to an 'educated and sophisticated audience' (73), this concise book is logically organized and nicely balanced. Each of Caro's eight chapters begins with a précis of no...