Developing the "write" skills for publishing

Publish or Perish mantra in the medical field: A systematic review of the reasons, consequences and remedies

OBJECTIVES

Generally, academic promotions, job retention, job mobility, and professional development of a medical faculty members are judged primarily by the growth in publication outputs. Universities and research institutions are more likely to recruit and promote those academics carrying voluminous résumés with larger number of published articles. This review elaborates the causes and consequences of the pressure to publish and the ways and means to cope with this paradigm.

METHODS

In 2015, database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effects, LISTA (EBSCO), Medline and Oxford University Library were searched for the English language full-text articles published during 2000-2015, by using MeSH terms "pressure to publish", "urge to publish", "research ethics", "plagiarism", "article retraction", "medical field". This search was further refined by selecting the articles in terms of relevancy and contents.

RESULTS

This research showed that some universities offer generous grants to researchers with a high h-index and with more publications in elite journals, which promise an enhanced prospect of citations and elevation in the scientific rankings of the funding institutions. This generates an involuntary obsession to publish with the primary intention to obtain promotions, high scientific rankings, and improved job security. This compelling pressure to publish results in widespread publication of non-significant research with a high index of plagiarism that eventually leads to an increased frequency of retractions.

CONCLUSION

Research centers and academic institutions have an obligation to train their academics in sound scientific writing and to apprise them of the publication ethics and the grave consequences of plagiarism and research misconduct.

Publish or perish: The art of scientific writing

Publishing manuscripts is the only way by which scientists communicate with each other. In recent times, there is an increasing desire to publish manuscripts from the developing world for a variety of reasons. Though, performing a research study is challenging in itself, writing it for publication is the final frontier that can be daunting, especially for the novice. Work that remains unpublished in one form or the other is essentially incomplete or undone. Hence, it is critically important for one to publish one's findings in a reputed journal. The purpose of this paper is to alleviate the mystique involved in manuscript writing and provide a blueprint where the subheadings given under each of the sections of introduction, methods, results and discussion can be expanded as per the particular study and the manuscript can be constructed in a stepwise manner. We hope that by following this approach, potential researchers and practicing ophthalmologists will develop the skill and aptitude for medical writing, and that the developing world shall do justice to its tremendous intellectual capital by making meaningful contributions to global scientific literature.