Publishing from Your Doctoral Research: Create and Use a Publication Strategy by Janet Salmons and Helen Kara (review)

A dissertation is typically the final major requirement doctoral students complete before becoming eligible for a terminal degree. Although dissertations—also called 'theses'—take many forms, most are expected to be original, substantive contributions to a field; most present the results of research for which the degree program served as training (and proving) ground. Instrumentally, dissertations are requirements, rites of passage that stand between their authors and the degrees. Ideally, dissertations should have lives that extend beyond their instrumental origins. An individual's educational accomplishments aside, what's the point of research if it's not communicated beyond the ivory tower? To have any sort of impact apart from the credential (or the few members of the doctoral committee), dissertation research must be published beyond the ProQuest Dissertations and Theses database or institutional dissertation repositories online. To learn how to disseminate your doctoral research findings more broadly, then, where can you start?

Assuming your dissertation follows a five- or six-chapter format common in the social sciences and the 'helping' professions (counselling, criminal justice, nursing, public administration, social work, and the like), Janet Salmons and Helen Kara's Publishing from Your Doctoral Research: Create and Use a Publication Plan could be for you. Yes, that's a pretty hefty assumption—one that reminded me at once of the unexpectedly narrow scope of Tonette Rocco and Tim Hatcher's Handbook of Scholarly Writing and Publishing.¹ When titles overreach, authors must demarcate their intended audiences early and obviously. Especially in the how-to genre, readers at the start likely lack broad contextual awareness; they would not notice the overreach if it tapped them on the shoulder. Publishing from Your Doctoral Research offers a sound premise and a robust framework for action. But by eliding important context, the work demonstrates what happens when the curse of knowledge colours universalist presumptions.

The co-authors, independent researchers on both sides of the Atlantic (Salmons is based in the United States; Kara, in the United Kingdom), clearly present their main premise in the opening chapter: 'the types of publications you choose to produce, and the ways you shape the content of your writing, can be strategically selected in order to achieve life and career goals' (2). As long as the goals are realistic, I welcome the agency; it squares nicely with the co-authors' aims of helping readers create individually tailored publication strategies. All that's needed is knowledge of how to go about generating and carrying out such strategies—and that's, broadly speaking, the point of the book. Across twelve chapters averaging twenty-four pages, the co-authors challenge readers to survey their 'assets' and consider transforming these materials into journal articles, books or book chapters, case studies, blogs, and materials in a host of 'alternate' formats: zines, comics, graphic books, research-based fiction, songs, animation, film.² These 'assets' are simply extant materials that can be mined for publication: the dissertation itself, notes that didn't find their way into the dissertation, annotated bibliographies, papers for graduate coursework, presentations, other reports. The important message is one that many doctoral students miss: at least some of the voluminous, inward-focused work that goes into graduate education, if it is of high enough quality, can have a second, outward-focused life.

Salmons and Kara's framework for action, the subject of chapter 2, is equally straightforward. Summarized in a textual figure that reappears in subsequent chapters with modifications tailored to the various genres, the framework involves five approaches for transforming assets into publications: extracting, condensing, expanding, adapting, and applying. This framework reinforces that a doctoral...