Although the main aim of your postgraduate programme will be for you to be awarded a masters degree or a doctorate, it will add considerably to your achievement if some or all of your work is eventually published in a journal or as a book. For a masters degree dissertation there is no formal expectation that you will publish, but one of the indicators of the best work at this level is that it is seen as being of publishable quality. Where a distinction award is made this will usually indicate that your dissertation has work in it that should be published.

For a doctorate the standard required to pass is that your work and findings are of publishable quality, so you will find that there is some expectation from your university that you will try to publish some or all of your work. If you are planning to progress from the postgraduate course to a career as an academic or as a researcher then having some work published from your research is almost essential. What you can publish and when, though, will depend on your own university rsquo s regulations. In some universities you are not allowed to publish work from your thesis or dissertation until after it has been submitted for examination for your degree. In other universities there is more flexibility on this, and providing you do not publish the final version of any sections of your work before you are examined then there is not a problem. You need to check this very carefully with your tutor before deciding whether to publish any of your findings, therefore. As a doctoral student you will be encouraged to attend academic conferences in your discipline, particularly as you get towards the end of your studies.

How Do I Start Writing My Thesis

This enables you to meet and mix with academics and other researchers in your field and to listen to their ideas. It may also be possible for you to present papers on your developing ideas from your research and get some views and ideas from others. Care needs to be taken with this for the same reasons that publishing may be a problem as you go along. In many disciplines there is a tradition of post doctoral studies, when students spend time after their phd to prepare papers from their research and take their research on a little further. However, this is not easy for masters students, unless they progress to a doctorate, and it is also not easy for those who leave academic life after their postgraduate studies and enter a different career.

Whatever your circumstances, though, you should consider carefully trying to get one or more papers from your work published. This will raise the profile for your work, which will then be more easily accessible than your thesis. It will also demonstrate to yourself that you have truly produced some research that has made a lsquo contribution to knowledge rsquo. One final point to consider in all this is that you may not wish your work to be published either because it contains controversial ideas or because it contains findings that are of commercial value. Universities are sensitive to both these problems, and all have systems for ensuring your work stays confidential if necessary ndash your tutor will be able to provide advice on this. If your ideas are of commercial value then the university will be able to provide expert advice on such things as registering patents or setting up a company to exploit the discovery. Ive been informed by several people that in us based institutions, masters students are continuously encouraged to publish their material by their supervisors and institutions.

One of the requirements, as with most postgraduate courses, was to undertake a research based thesis. Out of the 21 students, so far only a single person roland sookias has had their research published. I have been informed that from at least the previous two years, this is pretty much the normal rate of publication! in fact, during the entire year i studied there, not a single supervisor/lecturer even mentioned formal publication or how to even approach manuscript preparation. This is an essential skill that all students should be taught really, and at least in my academic experience has been mysteriously neglected, by both students and their respective supervisors and lecturers it seems. This is especially the case, i feel, for masters students who wish to progress in academia, particularly through phd research.

Papers are academic currency, and the sooner you start accumulating wealth, the better. Admittedly, at the time of submission, the research was probably somewhere around option 2 ive since done some additional analyses and found some cool stuff. This has taken some extra time, alongside my phd, but to get a peer reviewed publication out of it, its worth doing i think as an early career researcher and im sure many others would agree. The nhm in london is a world class research institution, and all research conducted here should be published in some form, regardless of the academic level of the person conducting it. Dna extraction and sequencing in invertebrates , as this research can never be replicated again. Disclaimer: attempts to reformat your thesis may lead to an annihilation of the soul.

For this process, you have to go through many steps such as manuscript reformatting, peer review and possible rejection. Instead of this long winded, and often extremely time consuming process, you can submit your data and thesis, as it is, to open online archives. The only time this takes is that required to make an account free , and upload the research, in raw formats in most cases.

And accompanying data to figshare, and the manuscript again to arxiv to increase the visibility of the research. Since uploading to figshare, both items have had over 600 views together, which is substantially more than it would have sitting on my hard drive as a pdf, and im not sure about arxiv as they dont have any metrics like that. This has made the research open and available, and if someone wants to use it, they can freely, with the one caveat that theyll have to review the value and quality of it. Any scientist who think this is a negative step under values themselves and the role of peer review. For a phd, it usually helps to have publication experience, the best opportunity of which is with your masters thesis. on the other hand.

If youre not planning on going into further education after course completion, why should you publish? well, you dont have to follow the traditional route the above is a time easy alternative, and is a sure way of making your research open and accessible. So masters level research appears, to me, a severely under tapped source of scientific research in the uk. This is not just in terms of results and conclusions drawn, but also the literature critiques that accompany them, potential new methodologies, and the original re usable data. Publication promotes an individuals academic growth, and credibility as an author. Despite potentially being a difficult and time consuming task, preparing and submitting a manuscript can be emotionally satisfying, and give a student a great sense of accomplishment and a confidence boost. If, however, you dont want to pursue this route, you still have a duty to make your research accessible, and now with tools like figshare and arxiv, that take just minutes instead of weeks or months to publish with, theres really no excuse any more. Wouldnt it be wonderful if the fruits of so much labour from young scientists was made free for people to read and use, instead of being archived into dusty institutional shelves.