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 identifier.  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.  There are writing and research preparation courses available in certain programs as well in the Career Develpment for Researchers.  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

We license EndNote for reference 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. 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 us 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. 

We aim to support all OHSU members' systematic and scoping review activities, orienting OHSU members who are new to systematic reviews and facilitating the quality, rigor, and reproducibility of systematic reviews produced by OHSU members.

We can support your review in a variety of ways, depending on what your team needs.

We can assist with: 

• Developing research questions 
• Performing literature searches 
• Advising on methodology (review type, software selection, reporting) 
• Writing search documentation and methodology 
• Providing editorial feedback

Book a meeting with us to get things started.

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.