Publishing as a PhD Student, Jayci P. - Oklahoma State University

My name is Jayci Pickering. I am a doctoral candidate here at OSU in the management department. I think there's kind of a big cloud that hangs over you when you start the program about like needing to publish as fast as possible. The term publisher perish is used a lot, and that as soon as you start the program there's this pressure to get publications out. 

Our faculty is good about helping us pace ourselves and be realistic with our own goals. So we have progress meetings. I mean, I meet with my advisor once a week and she knows what my goals look like, and we're cognizant of those goals and try to be proactive towards meeting them. But, we also have a yearly progress updates where we meet with our program coordinator, and he goes over what projects we're working on. Whether we've had any publications, what we're planning to publish, and then again goes over what we want our goals to look like. So what type of placement are we looking for after we graduate? Where should we be focusing on publishing based on those goals? etc. 

Those meetings are really helpful to kind of orient you and help you understand what you need to be doing, whether you're lagging behind anything like that. So it just makes the whole process of publishing a little less daunting, because it breaks it up into pieces so you don't feel like you're on your own just kind of floating trying to make it and figure out how to publish. It's like yes you're in this brand new big world, but you also have people that are really checking in with you incrementally to make sure you're progressing like you should be. 

I had a lot of ideas when I came to the program that I realized quickly were not all of that novel or maybe they weren't testable. I think something our faculty is good at is you know, okay this idea maybe wouldn't work like that, but let's look at it like this. Here's what people that are publishing in that area, here's what they have done. It's never like a dead end with them, it's okay maybe this doesn't work as is, but let's keep kind of playing around with it and see what we can make it become. In that sense, they are really encouraging you to research things that you're interested in because if not it's it's not as fun of a process, you know?

So one thing I didn't realize was the importance of journals. So certain journals publish different topics and one thing that I found helpful in terms of like pursuing my passions is looking for special issues. Journals will do special issues about more specific topics. For instance, we were looking at firefighters and different coping mechanisms that they might rely on. There was a special issue about emotional labor in First Responders. So we looked more closely into that special issue. 

I think again our faculty is proactive about helping you find those avenues if they exist to get your research published, you know, and kind of match your passion. 

Do they help you with the writing portion? Yeah again, everything needs to be improved upon. So when I started, Lindsey was really good about "okay this is kind of the hotline of what we're looking for" and then I would send her a draft and it was very iterative. I would send a draft and she would send a draft back. Maybe the first time, half of my writing was you know corrected or deleted, maybe the next time it got a little better. So it's very collaborative in the sense that they're working with you to develop your ideas and to develop the paper. It's not just like okay go do it good luck let me know when you're finished. They're kind of walking hand in hand with you throughout the process.