2021 ACNS Writing and Reviewing Manuscripts.Key

Writing and reviewing manuscripts

Thomas P. Bleck MD MCCM FNCS Professor of Neurology, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine; and Professor Emeritus of Neurological Sciences, Neurosurgery, Medicine, and Anesthesiology, Rush Medical College

Editorial position disclosures

• 23 years as neuroscience editor of Critical Care Medicine • Now associate editor • Editorial board member for Neurocritical Care, Current Opinion in Critical Care, and Annals of Intensive Care • Previous editorial board member for several other journals • If you ask me for advice, keep in mind that I’ll naturally want you to submit your best work to these journals….

Publishing and reviewing professional literature • This will be primarily about writing papers for publication in peer- reviewed journals • Writing chapters is a different sort of exercise that is beyond the scope of this talk

Why consider writing and reviewing in the same talk? • When your are preparing your manuscript, try to envision how the reviewers will see your work. • Anticipate their questions and concerns, so that all they can do is tell the editor how great your paper is. • Get a colleague who is an experienced reviewer to go over your manuscript with you to see what the reviewers may find

Why do you want to write?

• You have something about which to tell the world • A case that you think hasn’t been seen before (or at least published before) • You’ve retrospectively studied a series of patients about whom you have something interesting to say • You’ve conducted a prospective study (with IRB approval, of course) • Someone told you that you need to publish something for a promotion, tenure, or a new job What type of paper are you writing?

• Case report • Very rarely published by major journals • Recent proliferation of case report journals • Remember to get permission to use photos, especially if the patient is in any way identifiable • Review article • Invited reviews will still get peer review • Uninvited reviews are rarely published in prominent journals but may find acceptance in smaller ones • Consider getting a more senior author to collaborate • **These are the typical ‘entry level’ papers for budding authors**

Types of review articles

• Standard review: you pick papers that help make your point • Systematic review: you define how you attempted to find all of the relevant literature (MEDLINE, CINAHL, Scopus, Google, etc) and provide some rating of the evidence

Real evidence-based rating

• class 0: things I believe • class 0a: things I believe despite the available data • class 1: RCCTs that came to the correct conclusion, and therefore their methodology was correct • class 2: other prospective data • class 3: expert opinion • class 4: RCCTs that came to the wrong conclusion, and therefore their methodology was wrong • class 5: what you believe that I don’t

Bleck BMJ 2000;321:239

What type of paper are you writing?

• Retrospective case series (with review of the literature)(did you need IRB approval to search for the cases in a database?) • Prospective case series (always needs IRB approval to keep a database) • Experimental study of some sort (prospective IRB if human, IACUC if animals)

Types of review papers

• Meta-analysis: the holy grail of the EBM priesthood. Often an attempt to shove several square pegs into a round hole. • Requires an estimate of homogeneity of the trials being analyzed, which is promptly forgotten (I2). • Systematic review: “an overview of primary studies that used explicit and reproducible methods.” (BMJ) • ‘Regular’ review or ‘case report and review of the literature’: • Meta-analysis is to analysis as metaphysics is to physics

Experimental studies

• Register clinical trials at clinicaltrials.gov • And remember to post the results there as well • For these studies, draft the results tables before analyzing the data • Consider drafting versions of the discussion for the likely outcomes before analyzing the data. This helps to avoid the urge to change your viewpoint after seeing the data. Are you sure this case is novel?

• First, search MEDLINE • And save related PDFs for later study, and, hopefully, for your paper’s references. • Second, look in a few relevant textbooks • Third, Google or Bing Where are you going to submit your masterpiece? • With the availability of MEDLINE and similar indices, you want to be sure that someone searching about your topic will find your paper • Don’t submit to predatory journals! • https://predatoryjournals.com/publishers/

Where are you going to submit your masterpiece? • Are the journal’s impact factor and immediacy index important to you? • The journal impact factor is the average number of times articles from the journal published in the past two years have been cited in the Journal Citations Report year. • Also a 5-year impact factor • The Immediacy Index is the average number of times an article is cited in the year it is published.

H-index

• The h-index of an author is an index that attempts to measure both the productivity and citation impact of the published body of work of a scientist or scholar. • The index is based on the set of the scientist's most cited papers and the number of citations that they have received in other publications. Are these measures important?

• Sometimes weighed in decisions about promotion and grant funding; find out about this first • My opinion: aim for a journal read by the audience you want to reach • People do still read journals • However, most people now find your paper by searching databases

The h-index of a publication is the largest number h such that at least h articles in that publication were cited at least h times each. For example, a publication with five articles cited by, respectively, 17, 9, 6, 3, and 2, has the h-index of 3. So you’ve picked your target journal

• If it’s accepted by first journal to which you submitted it, maybe you’ve aimed too low…. • Once you’ve picked a few likely journals, download AND STUDY the instructions for authors. • There are often different instructions for different types of papers

Writing the damn paper

• Study the instructions for authors again • The instructions for CCM are five pages long; if you don’t follow them, you’re likely to be rejected. • Go to the submission web site and see how you will actually submit the manuscript • Make an outline using the sections indicated by the instructions

• Critical Care Medicine author tutorial: http://edmgr.ovid.com/lww-final/accounts/authT.pdf Writing the damn paper

• Typical structure: • Title page • Abstract (usually structured; follow the directions!) • Introduction • Methods • Results • Discussion • Conclusions • References

Now it’s finished…

• No, it isn’t • Don’t rush to submit it unless you think you’re going to lose a race for the Nobel Prize • Put it down and don’t look at it for a day or two • Then read it like a reviewer would • Critical Care Medicine reviewer tutorial: http://edmgr.ovid.com/lww-final/accounts/revT.pdf

Saga of my first paper

• Took care of a patient with a unique problem and treatment • As best I could tell by going though many years of the Index Medicus and reading several textbooks • Wrote and rewrote the manuscript with my co-author and thought it was as clear and tight as possible • Mailed it off to Neurology…. • This manuscript has been in a file folder, untouched, since 1984 • Why does the white paper have this odd hue?

The title page was untouched by the editor At least the references were OK

Saga of my first paper

• After I calmed down, I realized that his version was clearer and more concise. D. Kotz et al. / Journal of Clinical Epidemiology 66 (2013) 359e360 Saper CB. Academic publishing, part III: how to write a research paper (so that it will be accepted) in a high-quality journal. Ann Neurol. 2015 Jan;77(1):8-12.