(Slight hijack) Don't suppose you guys have any advice on how to turn a thesis into a 12-page journal publication?
Been told that the research/concepts in my masters thesis are worthy of publication and I need to submit to 2 journals, there is a 12 page limit and my thesis is ~ 70+ pages.
My supervisor said it's basically a copy/paste job but I really have very little idea what im doing having never written a journal style paper before
I have plenty of experience writing journal papers in numerical analysis and computational modelling, but if your field is too far outside this then I'm not sure I could be of much help - at least with specifics.
I guess my very broad advice for general writing of journal papers would be:
* Start by reading as many papers as you can. Find papers dealing with subjects similar to your own, and look for common threads in terms of format, style, and the way the results are presented. How much introduction is usually given in order to frame the work? What level of detail do authors tend to go into when describing their experiments and results? How much conjecture is allowed to leak into the discussion sections?
* Then, take a good look at your thesis. Try to decide which are the most important points. What is absolutely essential, and what is superfluous? if you were to remove a section / comment / point, would anything become ambiguous to someone likely to be reading a journal of this sort? If not, then it probably should go.
* Finally, consider that your paper must be making a concise overall point.
Before you put pen to paper decide exactly what it is that you want to say with the paper. In an ideal scenario, what impression do you want to leave with the reader when they have finished the paper? Bear this in mind right from the get-go, and in everything you write.
I will say this though... there is NO WAY that you will get away with a "copy-paste job". For one thing, the standard required for publication in good international journals is far higher than in a thesis. But that aside, you need to be making a self-contained and concise point in a much smaller document. To do this, you will need to write in a different style. Certainly your thesis will help you and guide you, and you may reuse certain sentences or equations etc, but fundamentally you should expect to be re-writing and/or re-phrasing just about everything.
Your supervisor should be giving you plenty of guidance with this anyway. You might find that he pays more attention than you are expecting; after all, you will be putting out a document into the wider scientific community that has his name attached. As I mentioned earlier, journal publications are the real academic currency.
Enjoy.
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I'm sure he'll be fine.