Publishing

Chapter 47


Publishing




Publishing in medical education: Joining the conversation


As a clinical teacher, you belong to a huge and diverse international community of medical educators engaged in managing, researching and delivering education and training to medical students and doctors. Members of this community are in constant conversation, sharing, discussing, debating, exploring and finding solutions to the everyday challenges they face. Where these conversations are recorded and made available to others interested in the same issues, they become ‘the medical education literature’.


It goes without saying that, if you are reading this book, you already take a scholarly approach to your work as a clinical teacher. You are engaged in following the worldwide conversation as a reader, and therefore you almost certainly have something to say as a writer. There’s no time like the present: so why not start writing?


This chapter will discuss the various publishing options open to you as an author, describe the advantages of publishing in a high-quality journal, offer some advice on developing a strategic approach to writing and publication and outline some practical things that you can do to maximize your work’s chance of acceptance, and, above all, we hope that it will encourage you to get involved in the worldwide medical education conversation.



Where to start?


There was once a time, not so long ago, when people would have understood the phrase ‘medical education literature’ to mean simply ‘the academic books and journals within library collections’. To some extent this is still true, but nowadays, the explosion in digital and desktop publishing gives you more opportunities and choice than ever before.


There are many different publication formats and media, so pick the one that you feel is best suited to your message. The most important thing is to engage in that conversation with the community; once you get started, you will find that opportunities and ideas start to flow (Box 47.1).



Box 47.1   Possible ways in which clinical teachers can join debates in medical education




• Abstracts, conference presentations, posters


• Book chapters


• Book reviews


• Books (authored or co-authored)


• Books (edited or co-edited)


• Conference reports


• Educational case reports or ‘teaching moments’


• Lecture notes and presentations


• Literature reviews and meta-analyses


• Online repositories of teaching materials such as the AAMC’s MedEdPortal (www.mededportal.org)


• Opinion pieces, editorials or commentaries


• Pilot research reports; provisional or interim findings


• Reports of curricular developments and policy


• Research studies (both experimental and qualitative)


• Responses, rejoinders or critiques of previously published work, usually in the form of a letter to the editor


• Social media: tweets, blogs, etc.


• Textbooks and monographs


These are exciting times and clinical teachers everywhere are taking advantage of the opportunities the digital age offers to share their work with a variety of audiences. If your aim is simply to get your work out to other clinical teachers, it’s relatively easy to do it yourself, provided you have access to the necessary tools and a reasonable internet connection. You can publish virtually anything you like from the comfort of your own desk. You don’t even need to trouble yourself to set up your own website: it is a relatively simple matter to upload and share text, images, sound and video files using a vast array of providers and sites. Any format is open to you; the level of sophistication and audience involvement is up to you, from a simple Word document to a highly interactive multi-media resource. You can invite comments, open discussions and provide online links to further resources and references. You can manipulate images and text until they are barely recognizable when compared with their original source. You can set up information exchanges such as blogs and wikis, use social networking sites and post pictures and clips that may attract worldwide attention.



Reports of the death of the publisher are premature


The fact that digital formats make self-publication so easy has led to fears that academic publishers as we know them will one day become obsolete (Thompson 2005). In fact, at present the reverse seems to be true: publishers are going from strength to strength, new academic journals are being launched all the time, and editors report that the numbers of papers being submitted to their journals are continuing to increase. So it’s worth pausing to consider why it is that journal publication – online or in paper – continues to be seen as the gold standard and why, if you are a scholarly teacher, you should aim to submit your work for publication in a high quality peer-reviewed journal. Box 47.2 explains some of the benefits of having your work published by a professional publisher.



Box 47.2   Some ways in which professional peer-reviewed publication adds value




• Academic recognition. Publication in high-impact journals is still recognized by universities, awarding bodies and employers as the ultimate scholarly achievement and will enhance your career resume.


• Reassurance for authors and readers regarding the quality of the review and publication process. Editors and editorial staff are increasingly professional or semi-professional and increasingly undertake training. Many journal editors are members of professional editors’ groups and adhere to ethical codes. Journal owners usually provide a range of support services to editors including administrative support, sophisticated electronic peer review systems including plagiarism detection software and advice on insurance, legal liabilities and business strategy.


• Profile-raising. Publishers’ marketing departments publicize journals, issues and even individual papers. It will be easier for your work to appear in collections, such as themed issues or series, where it will benefit from being marketed alongside similar publications. Publishers can target your work at specific groups; some journals are distributed to professional groups and learned societies as part of their membership subscriptions.


• Authors’ services such as copy editing, typesetting and proofreading. Publishers will prepare your manuscript for publication. They will typeset and design your publication, sometimes using a distinctive ‘house style’ which will be familiar to readers. Some journals and publishers also offer technical editing and translation services.


• Archiving and indexing. The big journal publishers will ensure that your work is archived permanently and retrievably with a unique digital object identifier (DOI) number and that it is linked to various indexes, databases, libraries and repositories. This is important to research assessment exercises, and it will increase the likelihood of your work being cited. Publishers also fiercely protect copyright and administer user licensing on their own (and therefore on your) behalf.


Whatever format and medium you eventually decide to publish in, the advice which follows in this chapter holds good, but it is particularly aimed at helping you to publish your education research in one of the high-quality academic journals.



Plan your submission strategy in advance


Academic publishing is a huge and fast-changing field, and journals need to be competitive. Whilst editors are by the nature of their role dedicated to serving the academic community in which they work, they have to set publishing priorities, and one of their chief concerns must be to maintain and, if possible, increase their readership.


When making decisions about journal content, therefore, an editor will almost inevitably place the needs and wishes of the reader ahead of those of the author. You may be convinced that the world needs your particular article, but the editor’s job is to question whether his or her readers want to read it. The challenge is to make your work stand out amongst the hundreds or even thousands of other manuscripts that the journal receives each year. To persuade the editor that your paper is exactly what his or her readers are looking for, you need to plan your submission carefully.



Choose your journal carefully


Journals vary considerably both in scope and in the quality of work they publish, so it’s worth doing a bit of homework before deciding where to submit your manuscript. Naturally, you will be looking for a high-quality journal. One indicator of prestige is the impact factor; most of the older, well-established journals are ranked by this. Research assessment exercises, employers and grant funders are increasingly influenced by impact factors. Papers in a journal with a high impact factor are cited more frequently than those in a low-impact journal, so there are clear benefits to publishing in higher-impact journals.



image You can find out more about impact factors and other bibliometric measures of journal quality from Thomson ISI’s website www.isinet.com


Put simply, the impact factor is a measure of how often the ‘average article’ in a journal has been cited in a particular year. The impact factor is calculated by dividing the number of current citations to articles published in the two previous years by the total number of articles published in the two previous years. Other measures of a journal’s quality are more subtle, but a bit of research can help you to predict which journals are most likely to offer their authors good service (Box 47.3).]



Box 47.3   Some questions to ask to help you decide on a target journal




• What is its readership? Who reads it and how widely?


• Is it indexed, and by which indexes?


• What is its impact factor, and how does it compare with other journals in the field? Is it rising or falling?


• Is it peer reviewed? Open or blinded review?


• How quickly does it make decisions? How much feedback can authors expect?


• Who is the editor? Who is on the editorial board?


• Is it the journal of an academic association? If so, which one? How old is the journal?


• Is the publisher well established? What other journals does it publish? What is its marketing like?


• Does the journal declare its ethical standards? Does it have a policy of openness, and is it clear about its processes? Is it a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics or one of the other editors’ organizations?


• Are there print and electronic versions? What added value is there in the electronic version (e.g. dynamic referencing, early online publication, supplementary material, interactive reader responses)?


• Is it ‘open access’ or subscription-only? If it is an open-access journal (that is, free to all readers without a subscription), are authors expected to pay a publication fee at any point?

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Dec 9, 2016 | Posted by in GENERAL & FAMILY MEDICINE | Comments Off on Publishing

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