Is it bad not to publish from one's dissertation?

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

is it a bad thing if one does not publish from their dissertation? (recently I heard that some people are doing just okay if they moved on and did not publish anything from their dissertation, but i feel like this is not common maybe?) what do you think? thanks!

I expect this may differ across institutions, but also that a lot may depend on what one does publish. For example, if you don't publish from your dissertation but you are able to place a number of articles in good journals, you may have a good enough publishing record to get a job, receive tenure, etc. But maybe at other institutions it's expected that you will publish from your dissertation? I don't know. 

Do any readers have any helpful insights?

Comments

[academic migrant]

I've never heard of this, but that's just me.

What I've heard is more like, well, if you will be spending time on writing a dissertation, you might as well make each chapter as publishable as possible during the process. But again it depends on how much individual chapters are self-contained.

With a lot of hindsight, here's how my dissertation looks.

Intro - nothing special, just recapping everything that I have already written.
(the introduction chapter was written after the conclusion)
Chapter 1: My first publication that has its own contribution, but has many unfinished subplots
Chapter 2-6: exploring every single subplot.
A two page conclusion.

The unifying story was chapter 1's unfinished business must be finished. Otherwise individual chapters were not really connected to each other.

I managed to publish 4 chapters, so it was a fine dissertation for me.

[publisher]

I cannot imagine someone not publishing from their dissertation. The dissertation tends to define your area of expertise, that is, your AOS. So if you do not publish any of it, hiring departments may wonder. There are people who get TT jobs without publications - but they are rare, and come from very few universities. We mortals are expected to publish. And the dissertation is the first easy source of papers. Ultimately, I squeezed four out of mine (one is a substantially changed paper). Also, remember, you will be asked about the dissertation in an interview, inevitably (at least in the first three years out). So you had better have something to say that does not sound like: "I got sick of it, and moved on"

[I didn't really publish from my diss]

I mean, it is bad not to publish. But nobody really (in my experience) pays attention to, or knows, what your dissertation was about, especially if you are not abd or in your first year from graduation. So while you should try to write a dissertation you can publish from because otherwise why are you writing it and why are you taking time away from things that you COULD publish, there is nothing in itself otherwise bad that I can see from not publishing from your dissertation.

For what its worth, i haven't really published from my dissertation. I mean, if you paid a lot of attention to the details of the view (which nobody ever has), you can see it in the bones of what I have published. But I found the actual question I asked in my dissertation is one people just find hard to grasp and one that requires endless proof linking to a huge number of different detailed views and so doesn't work in journal article sized bites or get past reviewers. It needs at least a book and I don't have the time for it at this stage in my career. So most of my publications are very far downstream offshoots of examples that I thought of in virtue of my interest in what would seem to others like the quite different topic of my dissertation.

That made it hard before I realized the issue and moved on from the dissertation. But once I started publishing, nobody has ever asked me about my dissertation or why my publications don't directly relate to it. I have a TT job I really like, so I can't say I think it has hurt my career meaningfully (minus the slow start that I think harmed my first run at the market.)

[Open Minded Perhaps]

I'm surprised to hear any one would care, if you have an equivalent number of good publications to everyone else.

It does not seem like a red, or even orange, flag to me if you don't publish from your thesis but manage to publish other good work.

But it dose seem like usually, after you've put in all that effort, it would be a waste not to try and publish things from your thesis.

I don't think it is common to not publish from your thesis (in fact it is probably very uncommon for anyone who publishes at all), but that's explained by the effort point—no normative thinking required.

[Bill V.]

Publishing versions of chapters from one's dissertation first began as a response to the pressure of needing to distinguish oneself among competitors for jobs, by having publications upon application. It was not the norm before the last 25 years or so. The trend of a dissertation composed of nothing but several publishable papers is even newer.

If you can get a job with no publications, or with publications from other sources, great. But once you have a tenure-track job, no one is checking to see if you published everything you could from your dissertation. In fact, tenure standards are often written to say you must establish an independent research program *beyond the dissertation*. (To paraphrase Janet Jackson, you've already done that: What have you done for Philosophy lately?) So if all/most of your pubs are from your dissertation when you go up for tenure, that could be a bad thing. Of course, you are allowed to build on your dissertation work, develop unfinished ideas from it, extend it to new contexts, etc. Those are often the quickest ways to get publications as a new professor even if you aren't publishing chapters themselves. But there are no rules, and I think there are not even norms, about it.

[slac assc]

I would say it's not bad per se. What's bad is not publishing or having bad letters. I imagine the two tend the three tend to covary to a large extent, ignoring letter inflation for the moment. If there's someone out there who's publishing in their area, but just not from their dissertation, and their letters are strong, who in their right mind is going to hold it against them? Maybe some will, but they're not in their right mind. At least this SLAC professor wouldn't care.

[Timmy J]

I’ve been on a number of search committees. This is literally the first time the idea of checking for this has ever crossed my mind. I’ll forget about it again by the next time I’m on a search committee. Even if I did remember and did decide to care, the amount of extra effort it asks of me to check your publications against your dissertation would make the task of checking entirely unachievable within the bounds of search committee timelines.