Turning term-papers into publishable work?

In our most recent "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

Does anyone have any insight on their experiences moving from term papers to publishable work? I'm having trouble determining what good philosophical writing looks like and how/what I can do to improve the writing (and ideas).

Excellent question! Early in my career when I was having trouble publishing, I read an article by a fellow grad student in AJP and saw just how differently their paper was written from the way that term-papers were written: namely, much more authoritatively, and without as much background exposition as a term-paper. That would be my biggest tip: read published articles, and try to see how they differ in presentation style from how you write term-papers. It made all the difference for me!

What do readers think?

Comments

[one referee's perspective]

I think you also have to be clear about what your contribution is. This may sound really obvious, but I often find that authors do not fully understand what is original in their papers. Here it helps to be more senior, because you have been around the block, and you have read a lot of the literature. So you can make clear why your paper deserves to be published.
I recall refereeing a paper by a junior person - a paper that was rejected more than once (not by me). It was a really original contribution to the debates (which I am involved in) - but contentious. So I pressed that point with the editor in the referee's report. In the end, the paper was published in a VERY good specialty journal (one of the top two).

[Michel]

I know it's common advice to do this, and I have no experience with graduate students so what do I know, but... I'm not at all convinced it's such a great idea.

The main reason is just that graduate students haven't read enough on the subject in question at the time they produce the term paper (for many subjects, the class is probably your first exposure to that topic and maybe even that whole subfield).

Now, that's not an insuperable problem, but it does mean that it will generally take _a lot_ of work to revise the paper so that its framing and contributions are properly situated. It seems to me that time and energy is better spent elsewhere--in your desired AOS, to be sure, but also on other subfields you might want to cultivate. (In other words, I'm not convinced that the term paper is the shortcut it's sometimes presented as being.) Even if one of those coincides with a class you took and a term paper you wrote it seems to me you shouldn't limit yourself to whatever the term paper's topic was. You'll have a better idea of what a meaningful intervention in that subfield looks like when you've spent more time in it.

[Ten-Herng Lai]

I think it's worth answering the following questions:

1. What is the issue you are addressing?
2. What's wrong if your paper doesn't exist/solution fails?

Answering these two questions would help you answer

3. Why does this paper deserve to exist?

Once you have answers to these questions, you should try to work them into an introduction that clearly persuade others in your field that your paper is worth their time. Good answers typically include: (in social and political philosophy) some bad real world consequences, some important theories would be unsupported, we would have to significantly revise some of our intuitions, or we would have to accept some hard to accept conclusions. I think having some thoughts on how the introduction properly presents your paper instrumentally helps you think through whether you should write the paper.

[Bill V.]

It is not philosophy-specific but still potentially useful:

Belcher, Wendy Laura. 2019. Writing Your Next Journal Article in Twelve Weeks. Second Edition. University of Chicago Press.

[presentation before publication]

Fwiw, I think term papers should be thought of as potential future conference papers, and conference papers as future publications. Going straight from term paper to publication is hard, for reasons both responders state above and also because grad students haven’t yet mastered all the stylistic tricks needed to publish. Getting into decent conferences is another story, though, and so I’d encourage grad students to think about their writing from that perspective.

[based on my experience]

I want to concur with "The main reason is just that graduate students haven't read enough on the subject in question at the time they produce the term paper (for many subjects, the class is probably your first exposure to that topic and maybe even that whole subfield)."

When you write a term paper for a grad seminar, you are typically responding to a small collection of readings that the prof has chosen. You are marked for your rigor and reasonableness engaging with that literature. So even a very nice term paper could be judged as making an unoriginal or unimportant point, when the much larger literature is concerned. I think this point typically holds even when the prof said this can be turned into a publishable paper. I have certainly got this comment before, and I am glad that I didn't do it, that I didn't waste time polishing a paper that I would not be proud of later.

*The above is just the typical scenario.* If you do, or your prof does have a strong sense that the term paper deserve to be published. I do not mean to discourage, what I mean is that you can probably write a stronger paper once you start to specialize more.

But if you are determined to publish your term paper (as your first paper I assume), I think the most helpful thing you can get is to have someone who have published regularly on that field to guide you very closely on reworking that paper. It will get easier after one or two.

Good luck!

[B]

In my experience, it's less about what you do with the term paper afterwards and more about how you write it the first time. If during the writing process you read significantly beyond the course material and develop original thoughts about the current state of the literature, *and* you get an A, then it might be worth presenting or sending it somewhere (if it's not very short) or expanding it (if it is).

[faculty]

As are cheap in grad school. I give them out pretty freely for work that is very different. For example, something that is messy, but with an interesting core idea that seems to me to be novel (even if it's not as clearly articulated as it could be) would get an A, but so would something cleaner/more polished with an idea that is less novel/interesting.

I would say: if term papers are useful springboards for publishing, it's when there's a core idea that is novel/hasn't been published. What you need to do is first determine if that is true--ask facutly/people working in the area, do some research. Very good term papers can be not novel at all (they might replicate an argument in the literature that wasn't read, though ideally people are doing some outside research for term papers, or they might just be too narrow--a narrow response to a particular author is likely not publishable and/or shouldn't be published).

So I would say: start being more forward-thinking earlier on in the process; if you think you might have a novel idea, read around while you are writing it up, and cite the stuff you read, find out if someone else has written it, and try to write the initial draft to look something a bit more like the journal article and a bit less like a term paper. That will set you up to be able to turn it into something publishable. (I also second much of the above, especially about the conferences-as-intermediary advice.)