PhD by publication: writing your integrative chapter, 2 op

A PhD by publication usually consists of a set of papers published in peer-reviewed academic journals or edited volumes, and an integrating chapter. While this format of PhD completion is gaining in prominence, the genre of the integrative chapter still varies greatly across disciplines. The amount and quality of support provided by faculties and supervisors are in many cases inadequate (Nikander & Piattoeva 2017).

In this 2-day course we discuss the integrative chapter as a meta narrative that not only reiterates the theoretical and methodological choices, and the empirical results, reported in the individual papers, but also, and more importantly, builds a narrative that explains how the individual papers link to each other and how they address the research objectives of the entire PhD. The task of the integrative chapter is thus to enable the doctoral student to distance from the individual publications to, first, consider and clarify their specific roles and contributions and, second, to develop the argument that connects all of the individual publications into a coherent whole.

The course consists of a lecture, two course assignments (first before Day 1 and second in between the meetings), and two seminar meetings. The lecture discusses the purpose of the integrative chapter and provides practical tips on various aspects of the writing process. The seminars and course assignments offer hands-on possibilities to exchange knowledge and experiences across disciplines, and develop and discuss the preliminary outline of one’s integrative chapter.