Research and Scholarly Activity Guide for Psychiatry Faculty, Residents, Fellows, and Students

This section on Publishing introduces questions for you to consider as you decide where and how to share your work.

First, decide on your Author identity. 

• We recommend signing up for a free ORCID using the link listed down below.  The ORCID identifier is requested by many publisher or grant submission sites to help identify authors as unique individuals. 
• Decide on how you want to be represented and use that structure of your name consistently.  Use a middle initial if you have one.  
• If you are likely moving between institutions, consider using an email account that stays with you and is not tied to an institution.

Deciding what you want to write and choosing where to publish

• Before you get started with publishing, reading the recommendations from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors is a good way to prepare.  The most useful ones are probably the ones on authorship and on manuscript preparation and submission. 
• Two of the more common scholarly activities are writing case reports and writing reviews and so these have their own sections of the guide.  Doing research and quality improvement projects that could be presented or publishing is also covered later in the guide. 
• Avoiding pseudo-journals (also called predatory journals by some) is challenging -- there is some guidance from the ICMJE and the OHSU Library has offered presentations on this topic, and we are happy to discuss finding venues in which to publish. 

Writing support

The OHSU School of Nursing provides helpful handouts for several types of writing at the Writing Center link below.  There are writing and research preparation courses available in certain programs as well in the Car Develpment for Researchers link.  The Library provides online guides about scientific writing, such as Lang, T. A. (2010). How to write, publish, and present in the health sciences : A guide for clinicians & laboratory researchers. American College of Physicians. It can be viewed in the library catalog below.

Managing your references and your full-text articles

The OHSU Library licenses EndNote for bibliographic management so you can manage citations in personal libraries and create bibliographies based on a number of available journal or writing styles.  We also describe free reference management software programs like Zotero that offer similar functions. 

Thinking about publishing a case report? 

Talk with your team members involved with the case to make sure that everyone is comfortable about sharing and documenting the details of the case. This is especially important for cases that did not have a positive outcome, where the details of the case could be identifiable and consent may be needed to share information or photographs or other documentation (see the Doing Research or Quality Improvement - Research Ethics section of this guide for an example form).  This may also start the conversation about authorship--who is going to contribute to the writeup and what order should they appear as authors.  Team members who are not authors may be included in the acknowledgements with their permission.  Some journals require written permission to mention someone by name in the acknowledgments but even if they don't, be sure to communicate.

Writing the report

One important step in preparing a case report is a comprehensive search of the literature to know whether other cases like yours have already been published.  In addition to searching PubMed, we recommend that you ask an OHSU librarian to help you search EMBASE which includes some international biomedical literature not covered in PubMed.  

Listed below are some quick guides for writing case reports from International Committee of Medical Journal Editors and Heart Views.

Publishing the report

There are several journals that focus on publishing case reports.  Some journals do not publish case reports or case series, so please check the instructions for authors for the journal of interest to you. 

OHSU authors are able to publish at no charge in BMJ Case Reports below courtesy of the OHSU Library subscription. 

The Library provides some guidance for helping you get started with scoping reviews or systematic reviews.

There are many types of literature reviews in the health and life sciences for which you may wish to consult with an OHSU Librarian on your search strategy and request articles from our Get It for Me Service.  Here we outline Library support for OHSU members pursuing a systematic review with the intent to publish their findings.   

The systematic review process also involves important steps before and after developing a search strategy and retrieving relevant citations, including:

• protocol registration
• screening and extraction
• appraisal and analysis
• publishing results. 

However, OHSU Librarians are not typically involved with the review beyond the level of the search, which should be acknowledged in your publication. 

Our primary contribution supports a key element of the systematic review, a comprehensive and reproducible search which aims to identify all studies relevant to a focused research question.  OHSU Librarians are expert searchers who can work with you and your team on the following tasks:

• Designing and documenting a search strategy, including generating key terms and subject headings for database searches and reviewing search strings created by researchers.
• Suggesting relevant databases to be searched and additional search methods, such as snowballing.
• Searching for studies in specific databases and documenting search strategies and results using the PRISMA Guidelines for reporting. 
• Using OHSU-supported or open source citation management software (e.g. Zotero and Endnote) for delivering and de-duplicating references

As systematic review searches are often extensive, the average search takes 2-3 weeks to develop.  Multiple interactions and your feedback are generally required to achieve the recall needed to identify all relevant studies, so please contact us a minimum of 4 weeks before you hope to begin screening abstracts.   Library staff can also advise on the most efficient ways to gather full-text articles for review; however, we recommend including time to request articles not available from OHSU through the Get It for Me service in your project plan.

At this time, OHSU Library does not subscribe to any systematic review screening tools.  We recommend the following guides, which provide additional information about the systematic review process, leading guidelines, and resources, including free and fee-based screening resources:

Writing Narrative Reviews and Book Chapters can be very similar.  Many journals only publish invited reviews, so if you have a particular journal in mind, check their instructions for authors. 

For evaluating the quality of a review, there is a tool called SANRA, the Scale for the Assessment of Narrative Review Articles that provides a checklist for what should be covered in the article. It doesn’t have a reporting framework that authors should follow, but it can help you check whether you have covered everything.