How to publish your academic writing on Medium
Reach a wider, non-academic audience on Medium by adapting your thesis, dissertation, or research paper
Medium is a great home for academic writers. It’s easy to write and publish your work quickly; there’s an engaged audience of thoughtful, curious readers; and our features are geared towards helping you find your community.
While there’s nothing stopping you from copy-paste-publishing your doctorate thesis on Medium, we’ve found that the best-received academic work on Medium has a few elements in common. This guide will walk you through a few points to keep in mind as you adapt your writing to find a new audience on Medium.
Why publish your academic work on Medium?
A lot of academic writing never gets published. What does get published often doesn’t get a big readership, especially not beyond its niche audience. If it does happen to make headlines, it’s often misunderstood. This is frustrating when all you want to do is share your research with readers who are most likely to be interested in it.
Another way to get your writing to the public is to publish it yourself — and many scholars do just that, sharing their work on social media platforms like X and Threads, or hosting their own blogs. The problem with those methods is that it can be tough to build an audience that will read that work. Plus, research doesn’t always lend itself well to a character-limited format.
That’s what makes Medium such a great platform to publish your academic work. We already have 100 million monthly readers who love thoughtful, nuanced discussions. We have niche, specific publications that have built a community about topics as specialized as the convergence of politics, policy, and ideas to paleontology. And our editor is incredibly simple to use — just type and hit publish.
I loved how former academic and current science communicator Silvia PM, PhD put it in her post about how she’d use Medium as a tool to connect with people beyond the academic bubble. “If I had a lab again, I’d see Medium as more than just another social media platform, I’d see it as a bridge. A bridge between science and society, between data and decision-making, and between curiosity and understanding. A bridge to support a successful career for myself and my students.”
Here’s what to keep in mind as you adapt your work to fit well on Medium.
Pick a single point
No matter if you’re thinking about publishing your dissertation or your lab presentation slides on Medium, it’s worth deciding on a single point you want to drive home and focusing on that. If you’re thinking of your thesis, pick a single chapter. If you’re adapting a paper, clearly define its main argument.
For example, I wrote my Masters dissertation on trends in bird species extinction and extirpation during the Anthropocene — a pretty wide subject matter! If I wanted to repurpose that research and writing for Medium, I’d start not just with a single chapter, but a single finding within a chapter. In my case, I found a strong correlation between bird body mass and the likelihood of the species not just surviving but expanding into new countries, and could write about that. Another possible example is taking the abstract of your research paper, or an excerpt that summarizes the findings simply.
Read over the work you’re thinking of repurposing and mine it for ideas. Jot down as many as you feel are compelling, but then pick just one to focus on for publishing on Medium.
Remember the audience
You’re already used to changing how you present your ideas depending on who you’re presenting to. If you’re a postdoc writing a grant proposal to get funding for your idea, you’ll handle that differently from writing up that research into a paper you’re submitting to Nature Cell Biology, for instance, or presenting it to your labmates.
Adapting your work to Medium is no different. We’re home to curious, intelligent readers who like getting deep dives rather than hot takes. But those readers aren’t going to share your background knowledge in your subject matter.
As an experiment, pretend you’re sharing this with a sibling or a parent — someone who cares a lot about what you do and may already be familiar with the main notes, but who won’t capture the nuance without you explaining it. Read it aloud and see how it sounds.
It’s also good to consider the visual look of your Medium story. While academic work tends to be on the denser side, both in terms of the style and the paragraph length, we find readers on Medium like some white space to have a chance to digest new ideas as they read.
Revisit your title
We’re not about clickbait, and neither are our readers, so don’t worry — you won’t need to publish your work on Medium with a title like “Scientists Just Unveiled a Radical Approach to Tracking Dengue — Mosquitoes HATE Them!”
But, “A new lineage nomenclature to aid genomic surveillance of dengue virus,” might not mean much to your readers, either.
Try to aim for a middle ground: a title that explains your research in a way that’s clear to lay readers, and gives them a reason to read your work. It’s also good practice to tie this back to the “why” you worked on earlier.
In the paper I linked above, it might be relevant to highlight how to help scientists track dengue and prevent another global epidemic like COVID-19, or discuss how vaccines are developed for other diseases.
Looking for inspiration? I loved Andrea Corpolongo, Ph.D.’s article on how to write better titles for space articles.
Make it relevant
To you, of course your research is the most relevant and interesting thing! However, our readers will benefit from a bit of framing around why they’re going to be interested in it. You can do this in one of two ways:
- Position your research in terms of current events. If you’ve had a strong reaction to an article in the news, for example, based on your research, that’s a great direction to go in.
- Show how your research applies to a more evergreen topic. For example, Dr. Pine uses her expertise to explain how teeth fossils help us understand why human childhood lasts so long.
Include this positioning in the introduction to ensure readers immediately grasp why they should be interested in your work.
Include your authority
Medium readers want to know why they should trust the writer. Sharing your academic expertise — years you spent in your lab, any professional experience, your titles — can help them know why you’re an authority they can rely on.
It’s great to put this in your profile name and bio so readers can see it at a glance when they’re deciding whether to read your article. You can also weave it into your work. This can be explicit — “As a researcher in this subject for five years,” for example — but it doesn’t have to be. As long as your expertise is clear by your familiarity with your subject matter, you’ll build trust with your readers.
For example, Harlan Brothers starts his Medium story by writing, “Back in 2013, I had been thinking about prime numbers and novel ways of searching for hidden patterns in their progression.” This story is adapted from his much more technical paper in World Scientific, “Using IFS to Reveal Biases in the Distribution of Prime Numbers.”
Include (and explain!) any visuals
Feel free to reuse any slides, graphs, or other images from your academic work in your Medium story. Just make sure to explain it clearly — and add alt text to make sure visually impaired readers can still benefit from your visuals.
On Medium, most writers also choose to add a feature image to make their work more eye-catching and help give readers an idea of what their story is about at a glance. These show up on the homepage, app, email digests, and other story feeds. Feel free to grab a royalty-free photo from a site like Unsplash, or use an original image that relates directly to your research.
As an example, check out these simple-but-illustrative images Associate Professor F. Perry Wilson, MD MSCE used to explain why he thinks polygenic risk scores might be unreliable predictors.
Adapt your citation format
Citing your sources is a non-negotiable, rich academic tradition. However, on Medium, readers aren’t as used to having the text interrupted by citation parentheticals. To provide a smoother reader experience, you could opt for hyperlinks, or go for a numerical citation method like this [1] and include your references at the bottom of your story.
Use publications and tags
Medium has a few tools to help make sure your story finds the readers who are most likely to be interested in it: publications and tags.
First, let’s talk about publications. Publications are a great Medium tool to help your story reach its intended audience. Any Medium member can create a publication about any topic they like — and many academics on Medium already have, which you can check out on this list. You can also search through all Medium publications by keyword using the Chill Subs directory. Readers on Medium follow publications to get curated stories about those specific subjects.
If you don’t find a publication that looks like a good fit and think you might publish more than one piece on Medium, you can always create your own publication.
Publications, since they’re run by everyday Medium users, can have unique submission guidelines that vary from pub to pub. When you find a publication you’re interested in, check their submission guidelines to find the best way to be added as a writer. Once you’ve been added, you can submit your story to the pub using the top three dots and “submit to publication.” Here’s a help document with more information.
When you’re ready to submit or publish your story, you’ll have the chance to add five tags that describe what your story is about. That helps inform our recommendation system to guide your story to readers who are most likely to be interested in it. Go broad rather than narrow. For example, if you’re writing about paleontology, use “science” as a tag. You can check out our list of topics for inspiration.
Get feedback from your peers
While Medium doesn’t offer a real peer review, we do have two other sources for getting community input: private notes and comments.
If you want to get feedback on your story before going live, you can share a draft link with a friend. They’ll be able to leave private notes that only you and they can see with any thoughts, suggestions, and questions.
Once your story is published, you might get comments from readers. You can always edit your story after publishing to address anything your commenters brought up, or you can reply in a comment thread with them.
Of course, you’re in full control of your comment section. If you want to turn comments off entirely, that’s up to you. You can also hide individual comments if they’re not adding anything to the conversation.
Share with others
Many academics use Medium as a quick place to publish and then share with their own students, classmates, or peers. You can always post your work on our open platform and share a link to X, via email, or any other social media platform you want.
Decide whether to paywall
When you publish on Medium, you’ll choose whether or not to paywall your story. Our paywall exists because we don’t have ads. Instead, we’re supported by paying members. When a paying Medium member reads a story, a portion of their membership goes to the writer.
If you want your writing to be freely accessible by everyone, don’t paywall it. If you’d like to earn some money for your writing, you can paywall it as long as you’re a Medium member.
You don’t have to choose between the two. If you want to paywall your story but still share it with other friends or family who don’t have Medium membership, you can share your story with a friend link. Anyone with a friend link can bypass the paywall.
Have fun
Last but not least, have fun. Medium readers respond to your genuine passion and interest in your subject. They may not be experts, but they love hearing from people who are.
The academic pieces that do best on Medium are those where your personality comes through and you’re enthused about your research — that enthusiasm is contagious to our readers.
Use cases
Here are some of the kinds of academic writing that can be adapted and repurposed on Medium:
- Chapters or specific ideas from dissertations and theses
- Published work
- An excerpt from your book
- Papers that didn’t end up published
- Papers that were published
- Social media threads
- Lab presentations
- Conference presentations
- An idea you might want to flesh out before you commit to writing a whole paper on it
- A response to work someone else published
In short, almost any kind of writing, published or not, can be turned into a great, valuable Medium story. Hopefully, this guide gives you a starting point and some guidance on how to turn your academic writing into a Medium story.
