I'm in the process of sending off articles adapted from chapters of my PhD thesis to journals. I passed my viva a few months ago. I appreciate that the articles' fate will rest in the hands of the peer review system for each journal submitted to. Nevertheless, I am curious as to why articles from a successfully passed PhD thesis should have to go through a journal peer review process at all. Surely if PhD examiners judge a thesis to be an original contribution to knowledge then journal editors should think so also. Or am I being naïve?

I may be wrong as I haven't started my PhD yet, but I would have thought that the answer to this lies in the identities and numbers of reviewers. As far as I know, a viva usually has one external and one internal examiner, and the external examiner is one chosen by your supervisor or department. However, when journals have peer reviewing for articles, they appoint their own reviewers, and a paper is usually (as far as I know) reviewed by more than one person. Also, I would have thought that the peer review process for a journal article is more stringent than for a viva, when you consider their relative lengths.

You’re right regarding the viva: there’s an external and an internal examiner. In most cases, there are just two peer reviewers for journal articles.

I don’t quite know what you mean when you say, ‘I would have thought that the peer review process for a journal article is more stringent than for a viva, when you consider their relative lengths’. Although the actual viva lasts around two hours (in my case at least) the questions asked by the examiners at it are the culmination of both examiners’ ruminations on the thesis over several months, and as such the viva allows them to question the candidate about aspects of the thesis that at first glance my seem unsound. I can assure you that the reading of an 80,000 word thesis by two examiners and the subsequent viva is just as stringent, if not more so, than the peer reviewing of an 8,000 word article for a journal.

Yes the review of a thesis is as stringent as the review of a journal article but this does not mean that this data can be published in any journal without review. There might be for instance 100 journals in a certain domain and how will we decide in which journal it will be published. It will depend upon the scope of the journal as well as quality of work. So we need a second review. All students get PhD by going through a viva/review but every one don’t able to publish in top quality journals. Do you agree?

Journal articles are often reviewed by more than 2 people, my last paper had 4 reviewers. Reviewers chosen for manuscript review will also tend to be specialists in the exact topic of your paper - PhD examiners are looking at your entire 3 plus years of work in which you will have done many things and as such, perhaps can be thought of as more 'general' reviewers of your research. Remember that it is not only the job of manuscript reviewers to access the quality of research presented in the paper (this role having been partly done by your thesis examiners) but also to establish whether the subject is suitable for the journal you are targetting i.e. are the readers of this particular journal likely to be interested? Also, they will access whether you have conformed to the requested style etc. Good luck with your papers!

Thanks Explorer and Ann. That makes sense.

Hey Orian,

I'm not sure I explained myself very well. What I was trying to say was that, if you have a thesis of 100,000 words (ie twenty times as long as the article), and a journal article of 5,000, I would doubt that an examiner would spend twenty times as long on the thesis as he would on the article.

I'm not sure what criteria about lengths of time spent reading a thesis examiners use. But I'm sure it wouldn't be less for a PhD thesis than an article when one considers what is at stake with a PhD fail result (a life changing decision) as opposed to an article rejection (a temporary annoyance). Besides it would take the examiners longer to read a thesis if only because it is longer than an article.

in addition to it being journal specific, and the referees checking for the suitability of a specific piece of text for the specific journal, there is also this: whereas PhD examiners look at the thesis as a whole, the journal referees only see one part of it. now it is easily possible that not every section of your thesis is of the same quality, but overall it is a good piece of work. but if your, say, methodology chapter is the weakest of your thesis, in itself it might not be good enough for journal publication, if you see what i mean.

That's a good point, Shani.