Rewriting dissertation into article

http://jsbhseditorblog.blogspot.my/2016/05/rewriting-your-dissertation-into-article.html

One of the most common questions I receive, as a journal editor, is how do I make my dissertation into an article? This is the first in a series in which I will discuss this issue and offer some suggestions on how to approach this difficult task.

Let's review a few basics of the differences between a dissertation and a published journal article. An article, based on your project will be much shorter than your original dissertation. While a dissertation is often between 100-200 pages, a manuscript for a journal article is rarely over 30 double-spaced pages. A dissertation must exhaustively review the literature, however, the literature in an article is provided to put the study into context; the key issue is to lead the reader to clearly see the need for your study and the gap you are addressing. Much of the information in a dissertation is repeated throughout the paper- it can be characterized more as a book, a journal article should be succinct and to the point. So a few issues we have identified: your article should only have enough literature to put it into context, information should not be repeated frequently, and it should be succinct. Remember the basis of a journal article is the APA manual, so use the format it describes. Do check the journal's website for any exceptions it might prefer over the APA manual.

The first step, I recommend, is to do an outline of the project in an article format. Typically, this will be the following:

Cover page (title, your name, affiliation, and author notes),

Abstract (check journal requirements- typically 200-250 words). Keywords

Body of paper

Title of paper

(1-2 pgs) Introduce the need for the study (why should we care about the topic?)

(2-5 pgs) Literature review discussing variables

             Method

                           Participants

                           Materials

                           Procedure

             Results

             Discussion

             References 

Next time, we will start cutting down your literature for the paper.