About Suzannah Harniman
Until around 10 years ago, I was employed as a Registered Veterinary Nurse in a veterinary hospital where I worked mostly with horses. Whilst in this role, was responsible for mentoring student veterinary nurses and it was this which sparked my interest in teaching.
In 2014, I relocated to rural Gloucestershire and joined the Veterinary Nursing team at Hartpury University where I am now a Senior Lecturer and Programme Manager. Since joining the team at Hartpury I have the opportunity to gain various qualifications, including the one I am most proud of which is my MA Education, with distinction, from UWE Bristol. It is my experiences of preparing my dissertation project for publication that I am going to share.
My experience of preparing my dissertation research for publication
I decided that I wanted to share the findings of my research because educational research relating specifically to veterinary nursing is very limited. There was also no previous published research that I was aware of which applied a theory of motivation to analyse the choices that students make.
After deciding to publish my work the first thing I needed to consider was which journal I should send it to. I settled on the Journal of Veterinary Medical Education because it is the only veterinary journal that focuses specifically on educational research and the readers are likely to be fellow veterinary educators.
Before getting started on preparing my manuscript, I read the author guidance, provided by the journal, and made three discoveries. The first was that the preferred word limit was 4000 words (my dissertation was 20,000 words), the second was that the journal required Vancouver referencing (the referencing style of my dissertation was UWE Harvard), and the third was that the journal’s preference was that manuscripts were written in the third person (my dissertation was written in the first person). My thoughts were that these issues were going to be time consuming to work through.
I focused first on the word count issue and made the decision to focus only on my first two research questions, I didn’t feel I could do my findings justice if I included all three and I also had other plans for the findings of my final research question. I started by dramatically cutting the literature review down to around 600 words. I then worked on switching the tense to the third person and removing the information relating to the third research question. Once I had done this, I was still significantly over the word count and had to do some heavy editing without losing the essence of my research. I found this hard because of the effort I had put in to when writing my dissertation, but I kept in mind my desire to share my findings and got on with it.
Once I was happy with the content of my manuscript, I researched how to do Vancouver referencing and started on the task of reformatting my references, which didn’t take quite as long as I thought it would which was helpful. On reflection, it would have been even quicker to have used reference management software.
It was then the exam period at work and I had no time to work on my manuscript for a quite a few weeks. Once I had finished my marking, I had a chat with a colleague who is an experienced researcher. She made some useful suggestions. I then carefully proof read my work.
Next I contacted my dissertation supervisor and sent him my manuscript. He gave me some helpful feedback and was supportive of my plan to publish my work.
The next step was to submit my work. This was relatively simple and I received a polite email from the editor thanking me for submitting my manuscript. I then waited nervously for around a month before receiving my peer reviews. When my peer reviews arrived in my inbox I was pleased to see that my manuscript had been recommended for publication, by both reviewers, with minimal suggested amendments. One of the suggested amendments was to change my title, and to start with I wasn’t sure how I felt about changing my title. However, once I had a think about it, it did make sense to update it and the new title did better reflect the project with just the first two research questions. I was given a month to complete my amendments and resubmit my manuscript.
Not long after I submitted my revised manuscript, I received a proof copy to review. I pointed out a few amendments and sent it back.
I wasn’t sure exactly when my article would be published and a few weeks later I received a message from a colleague congratulating me for my publication. I then had a look at my published article. I was pleased to have been through the process and to have shared my findings.
