With three months to go until submission (and one month until a polished draft is required by sup' team) I am in the process of writing a few chapters. I am trying to incorporate 3 journal articles of mine into the thesis and I am struggling because obviously one needs to make them fit properly. To be frank, I am really tired and exhausted by the whole thing, and I imagine that - with naivety- I can just chuck some peer-reviewed material that is good into the chapter and sort them out without planning a whole re-write.... Anyway, I just wondered what failures and success people had (esp. humanities) with incorporating their journals into their thesis. there will be a central theme to the thesis and each chapter, but still struggling to bring the publications together...

Hi Chris,

Do you mean putting articles you've had published into your thesis?

What I'm planning on doing is just referencing myself where necessary, and then putting the actual articles in the appendix.

What I'm worried about though, is one of my lit review chapters was published in my first year after I wrote it, and I don't see the point in re-writing the same material for the thesis. I'm nervous about getting done for plagiarising myself. My sup says its perfectly fine to copy and paste from my article ... although I think I've essentially copied and pasted the whole thing and just added things in. Hmmm. Should I be worried?

I meant more in the sense of using vast chunks of the peer.reviewed quality text from journal articles in the body of the thesis since my early chapter drafts from 2008 and early 09 are in bad shape and need a lot of work for submission this winter.

I guess I would then footnote where they come from.

am doing exactly that with only 3 months to go as well. you can't plagiarise yourself. am planning to state that part of this thesis has been published in x. making it seem as tho i wrote the chapters first and then published. ;-)

Yes, I'm also going to copy and paste large chunks of my articles and conference papers into my thesis - and yes, these are well written and will probably stand out from the rest of my medicrely written thesis! But oh well, have that material and am going to use it. Will also include a note somewhere that have been published, so the examiners know that my work is of publishable quality (and so they should pass me!).

@Sue - that's my plan as well. to mention that as a way of convincing them of my credibility. :p

Hi Chris
I'm not sure how it works for humanities, but in Science (in my dept at least) it is possible to just stick in the paper as the chapter.  With an introduction bit just to say that it's published or in review, it's possible to have it as a chapter and any extra work that went into the study but wasn't actually published can go into another chapter. Saves time having to totally rejig the whole thing and rewrite it to suit the thesis, also it means that the more papers you publish during the project the easier it is to write the thesis and pass the viva (as it's obviously publishible standard, novel contribution to the field etc).  Can you do that with your subject?
:-)