Comparing Style Guides for NIU Theses/Dissertations and Journals

by Augie Morado

Last month, I wrote a blog post on copyright issues related to your thesis and dissertation, and I spent some time discussing the likely scenario that you may adapt part of your work into a journal article and will need to consider the implications that copyright could have on your ability to do so. In this post, I will focus on different approaches to style and documentation between submitting a thesis at NIU versus submitting an article to a journal for publication. While there is a fair bit of overlap between them, bear in mind that the thesis and journal article are two different genres written for different purposes, and the different communities that review and publish them will have different expectations for how they look.

The NIU style guides for both theses and dissertations can be found on our website. For both types of documents, the Thesis and Dissertation Office states that APA 7^th edition is the default style for documentation. However, we recognize that NIU is home to grad students in a wide range of fields, each with its own documentation style, so we offer students the option to submit their thesis or dissertation in whatever style they wish as long as they apply those conventions consistently. But in matters of format, the Thesis and Diss Office style takes precedence over other format styles in the event of a conflict. For example, the APA calls for running heads in “professional papers,” but they are not acceptable in theses at NIU, so there should not be running heads in the document that you submit to our office.

On the other hand, the journals you might consider submitting portions of your work to may ask you to play by different rules regarding style. Most academic journals have a Submissions page where you should review their guidelines before sending your article draft to them for consideration. As an example, we will look briefly at Computers and Composition, a multidisciplinary journal that focuses on the intersection between writing studies and pedagogy and the impact that computers and digital culture have on them.

 

Navigating to Computers and Composition’s homepage on Elsevier (see image above), we can see a menu on the left side, which among other things gives us a drop-down menu to its Guide for Authors. In addition to some links, we are given the option to view the journal’s guidelines either on the website or as a downloadable pdf file.

While your NIU thesis or dissertation will be divided into chapters, Computers and Composition asks that you label sections of your paper with numerals: 1.1, 1.2, 1.3…2.1, and so on (see image below). While the numerals alone are sufficient, Computers and Composition encourages writers to add descriptive labels to these headings.

Strømman, E. (2021). Crossover literacies: A study of seventh graders’ multimodal representations in texts about Pokémon Go. Computers and Composition, 59.

Additionally, given that the direction of research published in Computers and Composition tends to lean toward a blend of social sciences and humanities, its style guide asks specifically for APA 7^th edition, so even though MLA is the primary citation style of English studies, a subject that overlaps a lot with composition studies, you would need to change your citations from MLA to APA if you plan to submit to this journal.

And of course, other generic (as in “genre,” not as in “basic”!) features appropriate for the thesis or dissertation, such as front matter (e.g., table of contents, dedication), are not needed for a journal article, while others that don’t exist in your thesis are required for the journal article (e.g., a brief bio).

Your thesis or dissertation, not surprisingly, is written first and foremost for the completion of your degree, and your primary audience consists of the readers on your committee, followed by other scholars in your field who may find your insights useful to their research or otherwise interesting. The academic journal, however, is written primarily for other scholars and is published in a medium that benefits from a more straightforward presentation of your research versus the formality of a thesis or dissertation. More likely than not, your original thesis or dissertation chapter will not change in content for publication in a journal, but it makes sense for certain aspects of its style to change across these two genres.

Wherever you are planning to submit, familiarize yourself with their website and guidelines and also check out a few recently published articles to see those guidelines in action. And, as always, if you have questions about NIU’s guidelines for theses and dissertations, we at the Thesis and Dissertation Office would be more than happy to assist!