The best way to predict your future is to create it – Abraham Lincoln.
Scientific publishing matters a lot these days. There are many advantages of publishing in peer-reviewed literature, including fame and recognition, grants and funding opportunities, academic promotions and the sheer thrill of contributing to patient care in your own way. However, the scientific journey of getting published requires you to follow a stepwise process, very much like learning surgery other skills involved in good patient care.
It is sometimes difficult to initiate a good research study that ultimately leads to an impactful publication in a high-ranking peer reviewed journal. Have you ever wondered how some authors and groups manage to publish regularly? Let me let you in on the six key steps to successful publishing that you can adopt.
Step1: Do a good literature review and see what has not been done in your field of interest – find lacunae (gaps) in literature. This will make your paper novel and give something new for journal editors, reviewers and your readers to remember.
Step 2: Design your study well based on the PICO approach where P = Participants, I = Intervention, C = Control group and O = Outcomes.
Participants refer to inclusion and exclusion criteria and your sample size. These go a long way in defining whom you are exactly studying and more importantly, on which patient populations your study results are most applicable to. So think hard and define these well.
Intervention refers to what was exactly done in the study. This does not necessarily imply an invasive intervention like surgery, but has much broader implications including the interviews conducted (qualitative research), drug(s) administered (RCT), screening tests used etc. I am sure you are getting the hint on what an intervention constitutes.
Controls mean anyone who does not have the disease condition being studied or does not receive the intervention under study. This is a crucial step in study design that provides a comparative group and helps to make your results robust. Unfortunately, this is missed by a lot of researchers and not having a control group can make your study weak. Always think about controls when you are designing a study.
Outcome, as the name suggests, is the primary result that you want to study. In addition to study design, having a well defined outcome measure is critical from many angles such as sample size calculation, statistical analysis, manuscript writing, journal of choice and finally, novelty and publication potential. So think long and hard about the outcome measure and define it well including how it will be actually measured and how it will be recorded.
Step 3: Communicate with biostatistician for sample size calculations and discussing study design and methodology. It is essential to bring in the expertise of a biostatistician at the start of the study, rather than after data collection. You can learn the nuances of these interactions and how to prepare for them on one of the lectures on Sengupta’s Research Academy (click here).
Step 4: Collect data from all possible variables while conducting the study, including measurement of confounders. For example, think carefully about how you want to record follow up duration for your study (e.g. in days, months or years), how you want to record patient satisfaction (e.g. very satisfied to not satisfied) if that matters etc. Always think about other factors that could influence the interaction between your intervention and your outcome. For example, you may conclude that drug A is better than drug B for a particular disease, however, it may be that drug A was used in much younger patients with milder disease and thus was erroneously labeled as a better drug. In this example, the patient age and disease status are confounders. Try to measure all possible confounders when you are starting the study itself.
Step 5: Design a good Excel sheet and perform appropriate statistical analysis. See this free video (click here) on designing an Excel sheet on Sengupta’s Research Academy.
Step 6: Manuscript writing using standardized checklists such as CONSORT, STROBE, RECORD and CARE depending on the type of your study. You can Google these terms and find these checklists and use them for free. I insist that you check this out and not miss out on non-negotiable items in your manuscript. You can also see our lecture on this topic (click here), which shows you some examples of a checklist-based approach.
Following these steps will help you come up with an great study and manuscript that will have high potential for publication and be worthy of acceptance in one of the high-ranking journals in your field. Importantly, repeating these steps in every study will mean that you will not have to remember them every time, just like you don’t have to remember surgical steps every time.
Like Abraham Lincoln said, the best way to predict your future is to create it. Create the best content of your publications using these six steps and predict acceptance in the best journals soon.