[Nothing to do with the application process] Writing books

[Quix]

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So I have a few writing projects (self-imposed and otherwise), and I was curious if anyone else has any similar experience. These are on the back-burner until after The Beast, but I want to complete them before starting medical school (ideally, next fall).

(1) I am revising my doctoral dissertation for publication. I'm trying to avoid breaking the document into several different articles, as each chapter is essentially additive. I know there are a few Ph.D.'s lurking around; have you attempted revision and/or made it to publication? Who have you asked to read revisions?

(2) I am several chapters into a book about working at a psychiatric hospital; it revolves around the psychopathologies observed, issues in bureaucracy and care, and the frustrations of modern behavioral health. The nice part is that I don't have to make anything up - truth is stranger than fiction (e.g., the Halloween I worked in the psych ER for 16 hours). The difficult part is not violating confidentiality, so quite a few identifying details have to be changed. Has anyone undertaken (semi-)nonfiction writing? Again, readers? Resources? Publication?

(3) I will be assisting in several chapters in a critical care textbook (up to eight). Has anyone had similar experience?

 

[RxnMan]

...(1) I am revising my doctoral dissertation for publication. I'm trying to avoid breaking the document into several different articles, as each chapter is essentially additive. I know there are a few Ph.D.'s lurking around; have you attempted revision and/or made it to publication? Who have you asked to read revisions?...

Breaking up a dissertation does not lessen it's value. Breaking it up would give you more space to do justice to the material and make it more accessible to those reading it. I imagine that condensing 3-5 years of your work into a 3500-word article would be very hard and painful. (It's your baby!) Besides, any series of articles produced by a group will be build on each other (like what you describe). You can also submit an article series. For example, I was a part of a group that published a two-part article. The publisher allowed them to submit both articles with the understanding that they should go together.

From the PhDs I've talked to, if you get any of the material out of your dissertation into print, then you're ahead of 90% of them. Most people just want to be done with their dissertation and never see it again.

 

[Quix]

It occurs to me that I wasn't clear when I said the chapters were additive.

Chapter one was pure philosophy (reductionism & determinism). Chapter two was pure psychology/cognitive science (automaticity and backstage cognition & cognitive heuristics and biases). Chapter three was an overview of the symptoms, incidence and prevalence, etiologies and therapies for depressive disorders, as well as their comorbidity in five common medical conditions. Chapter four was a synthesis of chapters 1-3, i.e., part psychology, part philosophy (contrast between Beck's depressive triad versus Alloy and Abramson's depressive realism; then a presentation and critique of eight models of patient autonomy (both "cognitive" and "homuncular" (my terminology)). Chapter five was a review of psychometrics that can be used to assess depressive disorders in clinical settings, followed by a patient case metric designed to facilitate clinical decision-making.

These are additive in the sense that they build upon the knowledge gleaned from previous chapters, but they are quite diverse in terms of scope and length (Ch. 1 ~ 95 pages, Ch. 2 ~ 75 pages, Ch. 3 ~ 130 pages, etc.; the overall document is ~530 pages).

 

[RxnMan]

...Chapter one was pure philosophy (reductionism & determinism). Chapter two was pure psychology/cognitive science (automaticity and backstage cognition & cognitive heuristics and biases). Chapter three was an overview of the symptoms, incidence and prevalence, etiologies and therapies for depressive disorders, as well as their comorbidity in five common medical conditions. Chapter four was a synthesis of chapters 1-3, i.e., part psychology, part philosophy (contrast between Beck's depressive triad versus Alloy and Abramson's depressive realism; then a presentation and critique of eight models of patient autonomy (both "cognitive" and "homuncular" (my terminology)). Chapter five was a review of psychometrics that can be used to assess depressive disorders in clinical settings, followed by a patient case metric designed to facilitate clinical decision-making.

Let's take a step back here. Are you trying to write journal articles or something else? If chapters 1-3 are background, and do not present results (i.e., new data from experiments you conducted,) then I could see them working well as a comment paper to a relevant journal or a textbook chapter. If chapter four compares these models numerically (i.e., comparing the results of these different tests applied to the same population) then that's golden for a journal publication. If it is a commentary, then see above. Your description of chapter five reads like it is a significant contribution to the literature, so I would think it's golden as well.

Understand that I'm coming from an engineering/hard sciences background. My suggestions may not apply to the psychology and cognitive science fields, and are definetly not a judgement on your work's value as a whole. When I talked to my advisor about publication, his first question was always "What new data (and resulting conclusions) have you produced?"

My thesis was ~100 pages and it was brutal. I can't imagine what ~530 pages was like.

 

[Quix]

It's a humanities dissertation. We don't produce results. 😉

EDIT:

Actually, if you're at all curious, it's available here electronically

 

[relentless11]

So I have a few writing projects (self-imposed and otherwise), and I was curious if anyone else has any similar experience. These are on the back-burner until after The Beast, but I want to complete them before starting medical school (ideally, next fall).

(1) I am revising my doctoral dissertation for publication. I'm trying to avoid breaking the document into several different articles, as each chapter is essentially additive. I know there are a few Ph.D.'s lurking around; have you attempted revision and/or made it to publication? Who have you asked to read revisions?

(2) I am several chapters into a book about working at a psychiatric hospital; it revolves around the psychopathologies observed, issues in bureaucracy and care, and the frustrations of modern behavioral health. The nice part is that I don't have to make anything up - truth is stranger than fiction (e.g., the Halloween I worked in the psych ER for 16 hours). The difficult part is not violating confidentiality, so quite a few identifying details have to be changed. Has anyone undertaken (semi-)nonfiction writing? Again, readers? Resources? Publication?

(3) I will be assisting in several chapters in a critical care textbook (up to eight). Has anyone had similar experience?

As a first year PhD student, I haven't done my qualifying exam yet so I can't provide much feedback regarding the thesis, however I can provide input about (3). Over the years, I've done 5 book chapters textbooks and monographs involving clinical chemistry, biomedical engineering, cardiology, and public health. Most of these were as second author, while the remainder were as first author. Being first author was quite an experience, and actually the most tiring due the responsibility you have in terms of editing your own work in addition to the co-authors work. As second author, with my PI as first author was less intrusive on my academic and personal life😉.

Anyway, the only thing i can add in terms of the thesis is that my colleague will be finishing his PhD in the coming months, and will attempt to publish the refined (short and to the point) results of his thesis project in a top peer-reviewed journal. I will plan on doing the same per discussion with our PI. For the most part, we are guaranteed publication of our projects due to the new and novel nature of our work, but we have no idea what journal it would be published in. In my opinion, publishing in a book is ultimately easier, despite all the work because publishers usually invite their authors versus having to survive peer-review in journals. 🙂

 

[kate_g]

Given the fact that you later mentioned it's a humanities dissertation, I think you might be intending to publish it as a stand-alone book as opposed to a journal article (as assumed by other responders). Publishing a dissertation in book form seems to be common in humanities and social sciences; I personally don't know anyone who's done it in "hard" science but it must happen sometimes. (Almost always you have a copy bound for your library or archives, but that's not the same as trying to sell it to a publisher.)

In short, I have no idea how to get a dissertation pubslihed as a stand-alone book. 🙂 But my point was that most of the PhDs on this site won't either, because they seem to be mostly science types. You may be more likely to find helpful advice from humanities and social science PhDs. Here are some wild guesses: If your university has a publisher (e.g. MIT Press does a lot of academic books, and I know UC Berkeley or maybe just UC in general has a publisher) you should call them and see if they publish dissertations and what the process is. Academic books often get published in series (e.g. "Topics in Advanced Statistics Series" or something of that sort), see if you can find someone your PI knows who is editing a series. Find someone you or your PI knows who has published books, and ask them. If you used any published dissertations in your research, contact the authors and ask them what they did... Like I said, just some wild guesses.

If I misinterpreted and you are in fact wanting to publish it as a journal article, ignore the above. 🙂 I'd second whoever said getting yourself invited to submit it as a book chapter (find someone your PI knows who's editing a book...) would be easier b/c you won't have to cut it down so radically.

As far as who to get to read it, the short answer is "anyone who's willing to slog through those 500 pages." Your PI would be an obvious choice, as would others in your research group who would be very familiar with your work. Then you'd want some outside opinions, and here again I'd go with the "find someone your PI knows..." advice, getting someone friendly with your group and fairly big in the field seems like a common choice for draft-reading. And (depending on whether you care about broader appeal) you probably also want to give it to a family member or friend who is educated but totally outside the field and see if they can even follow it.

 

[familyaerospace]

I have yes to all three. Part of two of them have already been published, everything else is in progress.

My undergrad adviser is in love with his red pen even though he is retired. He likes crushing people but when you deal with his edits, it can pass peer review easily.