Medical journals welcome research papers from trainees on quality improvement (QI), but those papers are often faulted for inconsistent approaches and formats. Two editors at the Journal of Graduate Medical Education offer some guidelines on how to construct your paper and what to emphasize most in order to get your research published and enhance your CV.
How to construct a compelling paper
The editors discuss what you should explicitly emphasize within each section of your manuscript as it pertains to your QI project. If you haven’t yet begun your QI project, these suggestions also should help you with planning and implementing your project with publication in mind.
- The introduction should consist of a clear, concise statement of the primary aim of your QI project and how the problem is relevant beyond your institution. It should describe the gap between current practice and the proposed practice. “The introduction section must be brief,” the editors said. “This is not the time to provide an in-depth review of the literature on your quality problem of interest—which could be an important but separate paper.”
- A methods section should help readers understand how they can translate the proposal into their own setting. It should contain a rationale for why the intervention was chosen and link it to the specific problem it will solve. “The truth is that if authors do not articulate a theory or rationale for why their proposed intervention should fix the quality problem of interest,” the editors said, “they run the risk of designing a suboptimal intervention or choosing the wrong approach altogether.” You should outline how the intervention was tested, refined and implemented.
- A discussion section “should concisely summarize the main findings of the QI project, relate the key finding to what is already known in the published literature, reflect on the broader implications of the findings, discuss how important limitations could have affected the findings, and briefly introduce next steps to further understand the field,” the editors said.
- The conclusion should simply serve as a summary. “This short paragraph succinctly summarizes the most important findings from the study, without speculating beyond the results,” the authors said. “Conclusions should be appropriately conservative in relation to the study findings.”
- Figures and tables can be used, “which will avoid excess word length while still providing a concise summary of what was actually done,” the editors said. “Another option for providing more details is to include additional supplemental information for publication online.”
Don’t fear the dark side
The editors urge authors to consider including negative outcomes in their papers, including failures of the proposed intervention. Measures of unintended consequences also should be reported to ensure that the intervention does not create new problems.
Projects that fail to achieve the intended results are still important because they can help others who might consider similar projects and allow them to build on the author’s work.
Residents have a unique chance to showcase their QI projects at the 2016 AMA Research Symposium. The symposium features hundreds of poster and oral presentations, and takes place this year on Nov. 11 at the 2016 AMA Interim Meeting in Orlando, Fla.
The event is hosted annually by the AMA Medical Student Section, the AMA Resident and Fellow Section and the AMA International Medical Graduates Section. Each section holds a separate competition within the event. Abstracts will be accepted beginning in July and are due by Aug. 17.
