How to Turn Your QP into a Journal Publication (in Syntax)

You have spent a grueling year writing up your Qualifying Paper (QP) for your Ph.D. program. You have read and carefully studied dozens of papers preparing your QP. You have been having weekly, sometimes tense, meetings with your supervisor, and somewhat less frequent meetings with the other committee members. Now, you have a 70-page double-spaced QP, containing your analysis of X, resulting in a successful defense. 

What are the next steps?

1. To Publish or Not

Not every QP is ready to be turned into a journal publication. Sometimes writing the QP helps you to formulate your ideas, learn the background literature and get a good first version of an analysis in place, but is not quite ready for prime time. There is no shame in that. Make sure you have a long discussion with your advisor and other colleagues about the possibility of publication. Perhaps you need go to through some other stages first. For example, your QP could be presented as a conference paper first. Perhaps you could present it at some informal venues around town. Perhaps it just needs to be put on the back burner for a few months to let the ideas percolate.

2. Rewriting the QP

If you decide to go ahead with a journal submission, you should be aware that you will probably have to do some significant rewriting. A QP and a journal publication have different audiences and different purposes. You should plan your schedule accordingly.

3. Choosing a Journal

There are many different journals to choose from, including high-powered theoretical journals (e.g., Linguistic Inquiry), regional journals (e.g., the Journal of West African Languages), and everything in-between. Part of publishing your QP will be deciding which journal to target, since that will influence how you rewrite the paper for publication.

At the same time, you should decide if you want your paper to appear as a squib, reply or a longer paper. Some journals offer a choice between these options. This decision will also determine the final shape of your paper.

4. Audience

The audience for your QP is your committee, including the Chair and two other people. Since you yourself choose your Chair and your committee, it is probably the case that they share your interests and your basic theoretical assumptions. In fact, they might have even been your professors in your classes. Furthermore, they want you to succeed, so they will do everything possible to help you pass your QP defense. 

The audience for a journal submission is totally different. They probably do not share your exact theoretical assumptions, and in fact, they may be rather antagonistic toward some of your dearly held assumptions. Their only interest is in seeing high quality research published in the journal they are reviewing for. They are anonymous, since reviewing nowadays is double-blind, so they will not hesitate to tell you exactly what they think of your paper, and this feedback can be quite jarring if you are not used to it. If you felt that your committee members were being tough on you, then you will probably be surprised at how much more demanding reviewers can be.

These differences in audience have a huge impact on how the journal publication is written. You need to bend over backwards to clarify the steps in your argumentation in order to convince the reviewers that you have something interesting to say. You need to make sure that you are presenting your background assumptions clearly, and also to make sure that you have included all the appropriate references. The particular reference that you fail to include may be the prized paper written by one of your reviewers!

5. Do Not Write Archeologically

A QP is often written archeologically (just like most graduate student papers). You are exploring a topic, and as you explore it, you write up various sections commenting on the literature you are reading. So you might have a large number of pages (e.g., 10 pages) summarizing various points of view before getting to your analysis. While presenting background literature in a journal publication is also important, nobody wants to revisit your learning experiences with the literature. Everything must be written much more in terms of presenting and justifying your analysis. You should think about restructuring the whole paper toward arguing for an analysis, and not in terms of convincing a QP committee that you know the background literature.

6. What is your contribution? 

Often, when you write a QP, it is unclear until the end what your exact contribution to syntactic theory is, since you are basically figuring things out. You may have lots of interesting ideas, and lots of interesting strands of data, and that might be enough to pass your defense. But for a journal publication you want to clearly present (in the abstract and in the introduction and conclusion) what your theoretical contribution is. Why should other people not in your department care about your results?

7. Length 

Your QP may have been 50-70 double spaced pages long. This is probably too long for a journal publication, so you need to check the exact requirements of the particular journal you are submitting to. In transitioning from a QP to a journal publication, you might have to do a lot of cutting. Many things that were important to you in working through the data domain are, upon reflection, not so important in a streamlined journal publication. That means that there might be some topics that are more like extended footnotes, and do not really contribute to the main flow of the argumentation. So be prepared to leave some of your precious work on the cutting room floor. Of course, all of that material might come in useful in the future, in your thesis and other publications and in your thinking in general. So even if you cut it, it was not a wasted effort.

8. Timeline

Part of the reason for turning a QP into a publication is that it looks good on your CV for the job market. But you should know that the process of getting a paper published in a journal can easily take a year, or sometimes longer (two or three years). And the length from first submission to publication varies by journal, so you should pay attention to this factor when considering which journal to submit to. For example, if you submit on January 1, 2026, it can easily take four months to get a review (even with constant badgering of the editor). From there, you may take a few months to respond to the reviewer. Then there might be a second round of reviews. And even when the paper has been finally accepted, there could be several months of proofreading and production before the paper appears in-print.