This week, Dr Kelli Fuery, author of New Media: Culture and Image, has given us her top tips for getting published organized around the theme of interdisciplinarity:

1. Interdisciplinarity: on Publishing

Previous tips in PhD2Published have emphasized the importance of learning the process of academic publishing. In my experience, I have divorced the world of academic publishing and Academia. Publishers, all publishers, have one main goal – to make money. So in very dry terms, you need to present them with a product that they can sell and the more people that they can sell that product to, the better. Academics rarely think about their research in that way but it is a great start when you begin to write monograph proposals. A PhD uncut needs reworking in order to become a product that can be sold.

Identifying the core claims of your Doctoral dissertation and connecting them to specific fields of publishers will also help you identify target market which publishers can pitch to. Learning which publishers sell textbooks and which don’t is a great asset.

Interdisciplinarity in publishing means presenting your product and making it appealing for more than one target audience. The subject, the methodology, the level of writing – all these things can be presented in such a way that offer variety, diversity and depth to publishers so that they become aware of how your research can be ‘sold’ to more than one market. How you present that and persuade them is up to you.

2.  Interdisciplinarity: on Networking

If you are a humanities scholar then it is highly likely you work on individual projects most of the time. Look toward the Sciences whose research projects are predominantly team-based. The more partnerships you can form in research projects, the possibility of interdisciplinarity will increase. Make contacts at conferences, through inter-collegiate groups, get involved in college reading groups – making sure that your research interests are linked to other academics that are not completely within your discipline. Creativity and original research comes from taking risks and forging connections that are not readily apparent.

This influences both grant applications and publishers. The more you connect with your peers, the more you start to create a name that goes with a field of study. It is a little like Brand Awareness!

3. Interdisciplinarity: on Practice

Depending on which theoretical frameworks and methodologies you used in your thesis – can you develop various applications? Widening your case-study archive or examples used to illuminate your theories can help diversify your area. Look to contemporary discussions on your topic to do this. This will make your research current and alert publishers to the up-to-date status of your work.

4. Interdisciplinarity: on Outlook

Always stay abreast of your core research interests and at least 2-3 tangential areas that will help to incorporate variety into your potential publications. Explore grant funding bodies that have identified specific areas of funding and think about how your research can address some of their calls. More institutions are funding research that is interdisciplinary (Wellcome Trust Arts and Science); more journals are publishing articles that consider subjects from interdisciplinary perspectives.

5. Interdisciplinarity: On History

Interdisciplinarity is not a new idea. We like to think it is but there is a long history of such relationships existing in publishing and within academia. Examine your discipline of expertise and note where and how interdisciplinarity has occurred. Being aware of such history will help you articulate to publishers the direction of your research and to establish a precedent. It will also help you recognize target markets that you might not have originally thought of.