Start Planning Your Writing Early (Very Early)

When should you start planning a journal article about your research? You should start planning your article even before you begin collecting data.

This advice comes from Marianne Mallia, manager of the scientific publications section of the Texas Heart Institute. Mallia presented this advice last month at the annual conference of the American Medical Writers Association.

Mallia told the audience about a doctor who collected information about patients for many years in order to write a journal article about their disease. When he started to write the article, however, he found that he had failed to gather some of the information that readers would need. What a sad situation!

To prevent such situations, researchers at the Texas Heart Institute fill out a “pre-publication worksheet” before they begin each study. This worksheet requires researchers to list such items as audience, hypotheses, study design, and expected tables and figures. Completing the worksheet helps researchers start planning for publication while still planning their research

Two versions of this worksheet—one for basic-science studies and one for clinical studies—are posted in the scientific publications section of the Texas Heart Institute Web site. If you are a biomedical researcher, you may find these worksheets useful. If you do another type of research, you can use these worksheets as starting points for developing pre-publication worksheets for your own field.

This section of the Web site also has links to other resources. Thank you, Marianne Mallia and colleagues, for providing the pre-publication worksheets and other helpful materials.