The Long Road From Dissertation to Print

Some anointed folk publish in top journals during their PhD and spend their lives publishing in the Leiter-top-10. Most of the rest of us presumably have very different experiences. (My only publication ever in the "top 20" is an invited one.) I want to share some of mine to give young people a sense of 'what it's like.'

I am from the generation that was still actively discouraged from publishing while writing my PhD (obtained, 2002). Unfortunately, during my research I falsified the central hypothesis that guided my dissertation, so I was left without a coherent narrative (and, thus, no monograph). I had no idea how to write a journal article (see my tips here; and Cogburn's). Unsurprisingly, my first eight or nine submissions were rejected often with dismissive referee reports (and long delays, of course). I suspect that in addition to my lack of skill in writing articles, journals were not very interested in learning about Adam Smith's philosophy of science. (I even had job-lecture-audiences snicker at the mention of "Adam Smith;" eventually I switched to Hume.)

All four of the core chapters of the dissertation had a very hard time getting into print; they accumulated more than 30 rejections altogether. One (the most a-historical) never got past referees, and I eventually discarded it. One (on Hume and Newton) took eight years and countless rejections (even from journals (!) where the editor-in-chief had asked me to submit it after hearing the material presented) before it appeared in Enlightenment & Dissent, an intellectual history journal--along the way I had inverted my thesis. Another paper, on the methodology of the Wealth of Nations, was regularly savaged by referees (I once received an eighteen-page, typed, single space small font report, which taught me a lot on Smith's digression on silver among other things), and was published in a wonderful, super-niche journal (even by the standards of history of economics [a small, insignificant field in economics])--bless Warren Samuels' soul. Only the fourth, on Smith's proto-Kuhnian philosophy of science, appeared in a respectable philosophy, specialist history journal; it received extremely critical reviews, even from the journal's referees and editor that eventually (after two R&Rs) published it in 2005. It is now my most cited paper; a google scholar search suggests it is the most cited paper in the history of the British Journal for the History of Philosophy.

Is there any moral to be derived from N=1, who was educated in a pre-blog, pre-print, pre-professionalized era? With extreme caution, of course, here are four:

1. Dissertation chapters tend to make lousy journal articles. Journal writing is a distinct skill (that, in my case, involves a certain kind of 'dumbing down' even though 'clarity' is gained).
2. I was extremely lucky to hang on in the discipline on my pedigree and my supervisors' network alone. (After all, I got rejected by a lot -- tenfold? -- more hiring departments than submission accepting journals.)
3. Don't get too depressed about rejections and try to learn from the referees' insights. 
4. With less funding (and, thus shorter time) allowed for dissertations and the existing hyper-competition in the discipline, it makes sense to plan one's dissertation in relatively focused, 'modular' fashion so that one's 'findings' make for journal-size publications.

One might ask, how could a paper on Adam Smith become so popular? I doubt it has gained a wide audience; many of these citations are by me.