Publish or perish: tools for survival

Abstract

Success in one’s chosen profession is often predicated upon meeting a profession-wide standard of excellence or productivity. In the corporate world, the metric might be sales volume and in clinical medicine it may be patient satisfaction and/or number of patients seen. In academic medicine, including the fields of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, the “coin of the realm” is demonstrable written scholarship. In large part, this is determined by the number and quality of publications in scientific journals. Unfortunately, the skills required to navigate the complexities of how to publish in the scientific literature rarely are taught in either medical school or postgraduate training. To assist the inexperienced academic physician or scientist, the Writing for Scholarship Interest Group of the Harvard Medical School Academy recently published “A Writer’s Toolkit”. This comprehensive monograph provides valuable information on all phases of the writing process ranging from conceptualization of a manuscript to understanding of the publication process itself. In today’s society, however, there are alternative methods of disseminating knowledge that may be better received by some learners than traditional prose. Examples include videos, podcasts and online interactive courses.