When Do You Need to Wait to Ship?

You want to know whether your research is publishable.¹ You answer this question by shipping the best work you can do and seeing what happens.

But should you always ship everything when you think it’s ready? Or are there some times when you need to wait to ship?

Start with Who

When deciding what your research should be, you need to start with considering who it’s for.² The same is true when you’re deciding what it means to publish your research. And the same principle applies yet again when you’re contemplating shipping your work.

The key questions are

1. Is your who a professor in a degree you’re doing? And
2. Is that degree in any way related to the research you’re considering shipping?

If not, then there’s nothing stopping you from moving ahead. But if so, you’ve got a couple other boxes to check to ensure you ship at the best time.

If You’re a Student …

When writing as a student, there’s at least one special case where you might both have a purple cow and need to wait to ship it in certain ways.³

Beyond this, there might be more. I think the comments here generally apply. But definitely above these, you should prioritize the particular requirements you’re under for your program and the advice of your own faculty.

Still, the point you especially want to consider is the uniqueness of your future work in your program. That way, you can avoid inadvertently creating difficulties for yourself by publishing your research in certain venues too soon.

A good example is that a PhD thesis or dissertation generally needs to make a unique contribution to scholarship. The same can also be true at the graduate level.

But if you’ve already published for those outside your school (e.g., journal readers) a key part of what you were hoping to do for your dissertation, you might run into trouble. At that point, your institution might not think that your dissertation makes a unique contribution.

Even though you published the article, the key point may be that you’ve published it. And given that it’s published, it’s out in the world. Saying the same thing (or something substantially similar) in longer form may mean it’s no longer unique.

On the other hand, if you publish a key finding when teaching orally in your faith community, it might not raise any eyebrows at all. The who for your dissertation may be sufficiently different from the who for your oral presentation. In that case, your dissertation’s who might still finds your project to make a unique contribution.

Conclusion

So, as a student, you need to clearly understand what constraints different kinds of shipping, or publication, might create on your future work. Then, you can decide whether you’re okay with those constraints. Or you can treat what you’ve created as part of a larger research project that you’ll ship once you think the larger whole is clearly purple.

1. Header image provided by Kai Pilger. ↩︎
2. Here, I’m particularly playing off of and adapting the discussion of Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … and Others Don’t (affiliate disclosure; New York: HarperBusiness, 2001), 41–64. ↩︎
3. The “purple cow” metaphor I’ve borrowed from Seth Godin, Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable (affiliate disclosure; New York: Portfolio, 2003). Image provided by Emmanuel Ikwuegbu. ↩︎