Good afternoon, and welcome to the webinar, Improving Scientific Report Writing. My name is Stephanie Madrigal, and I am the Manager of Continuing Medical Education at the American College of Preventive Medicine. Today, we have the privilege of hearing from Dr. Robert Wallace, Professor Emeritus of Epidemiology and Internal Medicine at the University of Iowa, and Associate Editor at the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. This session will be moderated by Dr. Yuri Jadot. ACPM is a professional medical society of more than 2,000 physicians dedicated to improving the health and quality of life of individuals, families, communities, and populations through disease prevention and health promotion. Our members are licensed medical doctors or doctors of osteopathy who possess expertise in a broad range of healthcare skills, including biostatistics, epidemiology, management of healthcare organizations, research, and the practice of clinical preventive medicine. They work in a variety of settings, including hospitals, government, at the local, state, and federal levels, the military, laboratories, business, and academia. Just a few words about our housekeeping today. Please stay in listen-only mode. This recording will be posted in the ACPM Learning Management System. We encourage you to type your questions into the chat box, and we will be able to discuss those questions at the end of this presentation. Afterwards, ACPM will email you a brief feedback survey. We encourage you to respond so that we can continue to improve our offerings. It is my privilege to introduce our moderator, Dr. Yuri Jadot. Dr. Jadot is an assistant professor and associate program director of the Preventive Medicine Residency at Stony Brook University. Jadot is certified in general preventive medicine and public health. He also serves as associate professor and assistant director of the Northeast Institute for Evidence Synthesis and Translation at Rutgers University. Duly trained as a physician and social scientist, Dr. Jadot actively conducts research addressing health equity for disadvantaged populations with a focus on interprofessional collaboration, cancer prevention and control, and systematic review and meta-analysis. He has been engaged in several funded projects, including as principal investigator for a completed research methods research study focused on developing novel meta-analytic methods to measure the impact of having multiple chronic conditions on health outcomes, and as a co-investigator and lead project curriculum developer and evaluator for a five-year health resource and services administration training grant awarded to the residency program in general preventive medicine and public health at Stony Brook. He currently serves as treasurer and the jointly appointed representative of both the American College of Preventive Medicine and the Association for Prevention Training and Research on the governing board of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. He practices clinical preventive medicine at the Stony Brook University Hospital, employee health and wellness service, and co-directs the tele-preventive medicine service. His long-term professional goal is to continue working in academic preventive medicine and advance population health through research, teaching, clinical practice, and policymaking. Dr. Jadot. Thank you, Stephanie, and thank you ACPM for inviting me to be the moderator for this session. So now I'm going to introduce our speaker, Dr. Robert Wallace. Dr. Wallace is the Irene Einslinger Stecker Emeritus Professor of Epidemiology and Internal Medicine at the University of Iowa Colleges of Public Health and Medicine. He has a variety of public health experiences. He was first an epidemic intelligence officer, EIS officer at the CDC. He has conducted many population health studies, as well as clinical trials, focusing on prevention and control of chronic illnesses and other disturbing conditions of older persons. These have included neurological conditions, fractures, cancers, coronary disease, mental illnesses, and women's health issues. He has continuing experience with community interventions related to the prevention of falls and motor vehicle injuries in older persons. He was a member of the USPSCF and the National Advisory Council on Aging of the NIH. He's an elected member of the Institute of Medicine, now known as the National Academy of Medicine, and has been a past chair of the National Academy of Medicine's Board on Population Health and its Board on Health of Selected Populations. He has had substantial experience with NAM, National Academy of Medicine Studies and Panels. He's currently involved in several active research projects funded by the NIH. He is a fellow of ACPM. Without further ado, I'll turn it over to our speaker, Dr. Wallace. Thank you very much, Uri, I appreciate it. So I'm delighted to be with all of you this afternoon, depending on what time zone you're in. I would like to just tell you about some of my experiences and some of the things I believe to be true in improving scientific writing, and I hope it will be helpful to you. As I will say at the end, I would welcome any comments or suggestions that you might have. So let's get started. Next slide, please, Stephanie. Next. Okay, go ahead. Next slide, Stephanie. Okay, so what I would like to do, and I'm going to try to finish in 45 minutes or less to give enough time for your questions, but I'd like to try to help where I can, and what has worked for me and my colleagues and trainees with regard to personal scientific writing. I want to talk a little bit about maintaining scientific honesty and integrity, which underpins the whole process. There are problems with being an author that I would like to talk about, and there are also trends in scientific publishing that, if you don't already know, that I believe you need to know about. I think also scientific writing and grant proposal writing are very close cousins, and I think a lot of what I have to say with a minimal change is also, I hope, useful for the latter. And then finally, I've got my own favorite collection of aphorisms and advice. Next slide. So let me just start with planning a writing activity. I think you've probably heard many of these suggestions, but in the graph on your right, you can see that I put the title as foremost, and then the abstract, and then the paper, and so the whole point of this is that you've often got very little time to tell readers and potential readers what they're about to encounter with you. And there are things that I think can help, including, as you can read yourself, short sentences and keep the language fairly formal and straightforward. Try to say it in the title as well as you can. In the abstract, try to tell them why it's important in little punchy notes, and if you avoid acronyms because you don't want to waste your abstract time explaining your abbreviations. I think all papers need to be tailored to the audience, to the intended audience. I think some of this goes without saying. Try to do the best you can to keep it interested, and if you're going to a formal journal, we see this all the time, follow the rules, otherwise they will make you do it anyway. Next slide. So when you're planning a paper, there are some really important questions, and I think the first is who is an author, and more importantly, who is the author? So I think that this is a problem, and I'll talk to you a little in a moment about the growth and authorship, which I don't see as a particular problem, but it is something to be reckoned with. So an author, I think, is somebody with a real intellectual contribution to the scientific content, but since we see a lot of authors in papers, there needs to be a principal author, and then that person needs to decide who has been inappropriately left out. I think the notion of a principal author and a responsible author who are the same is really important because good work is going to demand accuracy, avoidance of cheating, avoidance of libelous comments and misinformation, plagiarism, I'll mention briefly, and then unintentional errors and sloppiness, which unfortunately tends to be a problem. So somebody in the end has to be responsible. Now sometimes it's the first author, sometimes it's the second author, sometimes it's the last author, but in any case, somebody needs to be responsible, and it isn't necessarily the corresponding author to the journal. There's always an issue that we're seeing more and more about what if papers are attracted, and I'm not really going to say much of that, but if you want to talk about that at the end, I can do this. I think when you're targeting a journal, the impact factor, that is how many people actually cite in a very short way, cite your article or articles in general, you may know that there are problems with impact factor, and I know they're used in part for promotional purposes and other purposes like that, but I think in an era where you can find any paper online with a little bit of careful searching that the people who want to know what you have to say in general will find you if you attend to the key words and the straightforwardness and the other bits of advice that I suggested. It's very nice to have a journal that has an impact factor of 20 or 40, there aren't many of them, and they're hard to get into, but it is nice, and I understand that. On your right is an argument for being brief. This is the Watson and Crick paper that appeared in 1953 in Nature, and it was basically just one page, and so it's an argument for clarity and brevity, and you don't see too many like this anymore. And they were right about the structure of DNA. Of interest, I was waxing to a colleague the other day about the fact that now there's imaging procedures that Watson and Crick actually didn't have to presume and hypothesize what the structure of DNA was. They could have taken a picture of it, which is interesting in itself. Next slide, please. Stephanie? Yeah, go ahead. So I just wanted to say something about acronyms. Again, I urged you to keep them out of titles and abstracts and so forth, and I still believe that to be true, but there is a growth of acronyms in almost all scientific work, and they used to be just letters, now they're letters and numbers, and the slides are just there to show you over the years what, in fact, has happened. What I'd like to urge you again, to say it again, is to not put it in titles because people who might be consumers of your work may not know what an abbreviation is, and they shouldn't. Another little bit of advice is to think, if you have more than a dozen or two acronyms, insert a little box with a glossary, and I think that will save you a lot of time and it will help the reader understand what you're trying to say. So over on the right, I attend a lot of lectures, a lot of scientific lectures. It's been actually easier with teleimaging, of course, and so I just pulled out three recent titles just to give you a sense about just being a little bit careful. The first one, this is a weekly seminar series in diabetes and obesity, and the first one I really didn't like because I didn't know two of the three abbreviations, so I'm less interested. The second one I pulled out was Remote Control of Blood Sugar, and I think that's better with the absence of acronyms. However, this could mean a lot of things, and I don't think it was clear enough. These are all real, and so the third title is the one that I just thought was the shortest and punchiest and still told you what they were talking about. The titles are really challenging, and a number of journals only give you a limited number of letters to insert it. Next slide, please. So there's also, I mentioned before and I want to say again that there's been a growth of authorship, and this is from PubMed, only to show you that this is just a correction of a paper, and look at how many people there were, so it really is getting to be a problem, and it's in fact getting worse, and if you go to PubMed or other search engines, you will see that it won't take you long before you come across a single abstract title that has three pages of authors in it, and I have to tell you that I've been in a few of those because I've been in a couple of studies that have been part of genetic consortia, and that's one of the things that builds up all of this. Next slide. So I don't know that this is in the Guinness Book of World Records, but this is a news item in nature from about six or seven years ago that claimed to have the, claimed to have set the record for the most authors at over 5,000. This is a picture of the Large Hadron Collider, which is located in France and busts up subatomic particles, and so the physicists seem to have the prize, not the geneticists. Go ahead, please. There's also been a little bit of what I would call authorship inflation, despite what I've just shown you. I'm not going to, I haven't, I'm not going to argue anymore about who should be an author. Some of the friction about authorship comes down to research assistants and people who may be important in lab determinations or literature searches or some other parts of a paper and yet probably didn't make an intellectual contribution in the literal sense. But everyone, there's room for, of course, acknowledgments. So one of the things you can see over the last half century or more is that there have been a lot, there's been a lot of growth in the authorship and they tend to occur in multicenter randomized trials and not particularly in observational studies which are multicenter and so forth. So this has all been documented and I think just one has to be careful. Next slide, please. So in terms of authorship collaboration, it can be challenging. And the number of international collaborations have been on the rise and I'm a member of several even though I will never meet nearly all of my co-authors. And I think by and large, it's a good thing and it's been growing as you can see over the last couple of decades. On the right is, however, an interesting finding also from nature, which is the fact that the number of Chinese collaborators which has been pretty high over the years and I think with good reason, a lot of Chinese authors have been prodigious and thoughtful and so on. But there have been issues related to restriction of letting go information because some of the scientific papers have implications for developing companies and products. And you may recall during the last administration, there was an issue of not allowing Americans who have affiliations with Chinese investigators to actually have those collaborations if in fact they involve exchange of money and so forth. And again, a lot of this has to do with industrial development and so forth that comes from so many papers. So this is something you just have to watch but I think it would be terrible if under the best of circumstances, we couldn't have international collaborators from everyone on earth. Next slide. I wanted to say a little bit about honesty and integrity as I mentioned. So let's go ahead. Next slide, Stephanie. So let me start with plagiarism. I couldn't help but be amused by this. I saw this review actually a few years ago. It turned out that nobody quite knows who the real Shakespeare was but one of the things that has been discovered through the magic of computer programming is that he had liberally plagiarized from other authors who may be equally unknown but they were somebody else. And this would not have been known without the ability to mine text in large amounts. So some of the most famous people have been impugned with all of this. Next slide. I wanted to say a little bit more about just duplicating. You should never duplicate anything that's more than a few sentences unless you put quotes inside it. Then I think there are limits. There are some limits to that as well. I think it's wrong to publish the same material twice if it's already published somewhere else but you can at least acknowledge it and you need to get permission. And I think a lot of authors know that. There's also a little bit of a problem of self-plagiarism in that, so I've been involved in some larger studies that have had basically the same set of methods. So if you put a method section in a paper, you can have that same section in dozens of papers sometimes. So one has to be careful with that and cite it and so forth because it can be seen as a kind of plagiarism although I personally don't believe that it's important and avoiding duplication of little bits of data I think is also, it's hard to detect but it shouldn't be done and it's been given the name salami slicing and I just put in a salami because I've been trying for years to get a work of salami into one of my presentations. There are other ways to prevent plagiarism that you may know, rewording other material which I think is okay as long as it isn't wholesale really copying, use multiple scientific sources and also focus on the originality of your report and not what other people have done. And so there are a lot of ways to do this. I think the most important thing is to say whatever you wanna say in your own words despite the fact that you may have seen that work somewhere else. Next slide please. Another problem that's not plagiarism but is that people don't talk about very much is inaccuracies in citations. I didn't think there was much study of this sort of thing but I stumbled across one paper in JAMA surgery not too long ago where they actually looked at that. So this was a surgical paper and they found that not over 9% of these citations had inaccuracies. Some were secondary that as you were citing somebody who was citing somebody, which you should not do, you should go to the original citation. About half the citations, the fact couldn't, of the ones that were inaccurate, the facts couldn't be found, the statistic cited was inaccurate and the conclusion would be contradictory. So I think one has to be careful with citations. It's important to get them right. It irritates your colleagues if you miss cite them. And it's not something that I think you can appreciate should not be done. It is something that should not be done. So, okay, let's go on, Stephanie. The problem of scientific integrity and misconduct is, it's hard to tell how big it is but I think a lot of people think it's a real problem, although it often doesn't come to the fore. You could say a lot about it, but I think some questions such as who reports it, most reporting comes from colleagues, okay, whether they're co-authors or trainees and so forth. It doesn't come from out of town, but that's a really interesting thing and I'll talk about that. Journals try to scrutinize this as they do plagiarism. Journals, because they have great programs can find plagiarism pretty easily. And if they find a lot of it, they'll call you on it because they're at legal risk if they reprint things that belong to somebody else. Third-party readers do that and I wanna show you an example in a moment. But I think the important thing is that the punishments can be severe. Here in Health and Human Services, there's an Office of Research Integrity. Funds have been withdrawn from institutions. For example, NIH has actually stopped funding whole research one institutions at times until situations were corrected. Careers are destroyed, people are fired and so forth. So it's really everybody's responsibility, the investigators, the collaborators. And I have to tell you, I find it a really big problem because I spend the time to read every paper that my name is on, but you still can't assure that all these statistical results were done correctly. And they're just things that are hard to see and you're grateful to be part of some papers and it's just a very difficult area. But I think one really has to be careful because when your name's on a paper, you are at risk, even if it's one of those 5,000 plus physics studies. So it in fact could be a problem. Next slide, please. I wanted to show you, I didn't know about Elizabeth Dick until maybe six months ago. She is a basic scientist and I heard her present again at a Zoom conference that was presented locally in cardiovascular disease. But her claim to fame, I guess, if there is one is that she looks at published papers and looks for cheating and so forth and inappropriate image duplication and so on. So I can't use my cursor because ACPM is showing you this, but if you look at both the green and the blue, look at the two green boxes over on the left, you can see that these cells are the same. It's the same image. Same with the blue, the two blue boxes. And then on the right, these are of course chromatographs. This is not what I do for a living, so I don't know what kind of a block it is. But if you look at the two that are circled in green, you can see that they're identical. Okay, so the question becomes, is this just sloppiness or is this malintent in terms of misrepresenting? And I can't speak for Dr. Bick, but I think her feeling is that a lot of this is with malintent. Next slide, please. Another, there's been another problem that unfortunately also involves the Chinese. And this has been well publicized and has been in science and nature. And the problem is that there's enormous pressure as there is everywhere for people to publish. And there are people training as clinicians who want to develop papers so that they can get better clinical positions. So even though these are scientific papers, they're really trying to publish to get clinical jobs in this case, in China, I'm sure it goes on other places. So I'd like you to take a look at this for a second. So this, there was a set of templates and there was actually computer generated studies where the authors never even had any participation. These were invented studies. And of course, that's awful. But I'd like you to take a look at this one. And if you can see how Dr. Bick discovered that this was potentially fraudulent in this study on the characteristics, in this case, it's micro RNA in prostate cancer. Well, of course I can't interact with you very much, but let me, you may see that on the parameters over on the left that this particular template has both males, yes. And somebody, I just saw a chat from somebody. Yes, that's correct. There are females. And so this was a wholly invented study. And it really got a lot of attention among publishers and so forth. And I think the Chinese were embarrassed by, many of the Chinese were embarrassed by this as well. Next slide. So this led to another use of the term paper mills and in the new section of nature a couple of years ago, it mentioned that 120 papers were withdrawn and so-called gibberish papers. And I think the publishers and the experts and the editors, authors don't, they're embarrassed and hurt by all of this as well. Next slide. Let me say some things about trends in publishing. Next slide. Excuse me. So there are some things to know that matter to you when you're submitting papers. There are fewer publishers and they're becoming oligopolies. There may be more journals per publisher. It's not clear whether there are more journals. Let me just give you, it's been estimated that there are about 30,000 scientific journals and maybe a couple of million papers a year. And none of this is particularly surprising. There's also been over the last couple of decades, forgive me, over the last couple of decades, there's been more open access publishing. This is a whole lecture in itself. I think one of the most important problems with open access publishing that is publishing that occurs only online. And there are an awful lot of journals that are doing that. And I think by and large, it's a good thing in that it gets more information out. But there was a study that showed that about 175 of these open access journals have disappeared over the last 20 years. That is they ceased publishing and there's no access to them. So I think the people that are hurt the most by this are the authors who don't have any evidence that they ever published a paper and it's not available to people. So the notion of storing somewhere, open access publications and so on really has become an issue. But the costs are rising. You may have heard the term predatory journals. And that is where, if you don't, it's just sets of journals that generally open access journals that charge a lot claim to have quick turnaround, but really don't peer review when they're really just doing it for the money. And there's been some control of it, but it's not entirely possible. There's also a huge pre-print literature in which papers are not, not peer reviewed at first. And so that's another important issue. Next slide. I wanted to say just something to remember that a lot of the things that you may touch in other publications and site could be copyrighted. There could be trademarks. There could be trade secrets, although that's the business of whoever is publishing. Some of the things could be patented and you just have to be really careful. And I'll get to one of my aphorisms at the end. And I think you'll see why. Next slide. And many of you who have published have seen a standard form for conflict of interest. I think this is a good thing. And I think you should get used to using them. This is an international group of publishers and editors that have put this together. Next slide. I just wanted to say something. I couldn't get through a lecture without saying something about the COVID epidemic. And only to say that it's really stressed journals in general. When I was introduced, you heard about my role in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, and it certainly happened there as well as many, many other places. This was about small sample sizes. What basically happened is that there were so many more papers sent to journals that were related to COVID-19, and all of this was important as we faced the pandemic. And it basically exhausted the resources of many journals. I don't think a lot of journals folded, but the important thing was that it just put a lot of stress on the whole publishing industry. And it's actually still happening. And yet, of course, it is something that we need to deal with. And so I'm very much in favor of a lot of the things that came out. And I don't know that it's totally a bad thing that an awful lot of people became COVID-19 investigators because they were saturated with so much information. But this has really, at least temporarily, changed publishing. Next slide. Another thing that's of interest to me, and you may have seen these in papers, is that journals are asking for central illustrations, single illustrations that are visuals of what the paper is trying to say. I'm not certain I'm a fan of all of this. I wondered whether it was an attack on writing skills, which I don't want to see. But you are seeing this more and more. And in essence, it requires that you put up a poster as well as your abstract and everything else that goes into a paper. So I don't particularly want to see this. I think some papers are too complex for it, et cetera. And if you have figures, you still can have all the figures that explain what you want to do. But this is happening. And next slide. I have one more just to show you. Here's one on policy with regard to strategies to use DNA to identify migrant families and I think that's a good topic. But whether this adds to the paper itself and that actually makes it easier to understand, the point is far from clear to me. This is from science a couple of months ago. Next slide. So I wanted to make a case for digital enhancement despite these programs that write fake papers. There's a lot to say about digitally enhanced scientific writing. And I just want to make certain that you know about that. Next slide, if you don't. First of all, the Cochran Collaborative has developed something called a few years ago called the Living Systematic Review, where basically they have a system driven text mining approach in part. But what they do is they just keep adding to the review and they don't stop. And a lot of it can be done again by machine. And it's just literally that. They keep adding to it. And then if it's worthwhile, they publish it at various intervals. The federal organization, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has actually been doing text mining to do systematic reviews. And I think the figure is not important except to say that they can do the text mining to do systematic reviews. And I don't know if that's to say that they can do the text mining tools. You can see in most cases in simple reviews actually take less time. And that's probably a good thing if the quality doesn't change. And I think there's evidence that it doesn't. So I think this sort of thing is useful. Next slide. So I have a slide that you can look at later, but there are an awful lot of digital software ways to help your writing. And this is from the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology. Because this talk will be available, you can find it if you want it. Next slide. So Yuri, I know we're coming to 45 minutes and I'm working through this and getting there. So I want to say something about getting help with writing. And I would really, we see a lot of papers that are not in all, I see it in many, many ways that are all that have problems with writing. And it's understandable. Writing is tough. It's a great talent like everything. Next slide, please, Stephanie. So my argument is basically to get help. Talk to senior authors. I've seen buddies, clubs for writing. I'm very much in favor of using similar paper structures. Don't copy the content, but the structures I think can be very helpful. I've seen writing clinics and courses. Here at the University of Iowa, I send lots of students to the English department, which has a writing clinic and they can't wait to see people. They like to do that. There are other courses. Another way to help your publishing structure is to use some of the publishing guidelines for various kinds of studies, such as Prospero or Moose. There are even software applications. Your Microsoft Word or iOS can tell you what grade you're writing at. Okay. And that might be able to help you. And of course they do make some, both, all of that make suggestions, whether you like them or not, that underline things in red. Next slide. So we're very sensitive because it's nice to have so many immigrant physicians, some of whom have trouble with writing. I just wanted to point out this. This is an example from the MD Anderson Hospital that they actually put on curricula and programs for scientific writing. And we're seeing more and more of those. And I know you can have it around here, but probably almost everywhere, all the large universities may have this and there may be other sources as well. Next slide. There are also published guidance on how to report various things. This is materials design, which I know nothing about, but it was in the PNAS. And I just thought it was an interesting example of telling you how to publish in various ways. There's just been a report on how to publish randomized trials that have been interrupted by COVID-19. So isn't that interesting that there's guidelines available for that, whether you accept them or not is another matter. Next slide. So I'm down almost to the aphorisms. So I don't know if any of you have ever been asked in your whole lives to diagram sentences, but here's what it looks like, by the way. And, but the argument is to keep the language simple. And next slide. Next slide. And if you don't know what an intransitive verb is or preposition, you should know because it matters. I'm going to let this go, but I made the case that writing a scientific report is very close to writing a grant proposal. And I just don't want to go over it now because I'd like to bring this to a close. Next slide. Next slide. So I have my own small set of favorite writers. One of them is Ernest Hemingway, who did most of his work in the early part of the 20th century. He had some advice, which you can read on the slide. And that's pretty similar to the other things I've said. But if you want to learn, if you want to enjoy reading fiction, well, semi-fiction, and I think you should, you know, if you read something like A Farewell to Arms, and pay as much attention to the writing as to the content, you will enjoy it doubly. Ken Burns and his colleague have recently put it, have done a history of Ernest Hemingway. Next slide. It's amazing to me that the book, The Godfather, which was written by Mario Puzo, of all the ways to say this, and I wish I could get a nickel for every different way of saying it, but he said, the secret of writing is rewriting. And I think that is the most true of all the aphorisms I can tell you. You've got to go back over your own work and learn how to do that. Next slide. So I told you, I was going to give you one aphorism, and I think it's really true, and it's sort of an irony, of course, that the more important and valuable your work is, the more it will be scrutinized. And so, the more important it is, the more the Elizabeth Bicks of our time are going to come and find that for you. And then I have one more, one more suggestion from my sister, okay. So my sister is retired and was a journalist and editor and, in the end, edited magazines. And her advice was, have a point. She was much brassier than I've ever been, but anyway. So, next slide. So thank you. Again, I'd really like to hear your comments and your suggestions on how to be a better writer. A lot has been written about this. It's almost an industry in itself. But I'm always looking for good ideas and how to make it better for my trainees and everyone else who is trying to write scientific reports. So thank you. And Stephanie, I think I'll turn it back to you and then to Yuri. You have a couple of slides, I think. Yes, that one. Okay. So... Great. We'll let Dr. Jadot turn it over for questions. All right. So thank you for a great presentation. So there's an interesting question. So the question from a participant, it says, brevity in scientific reports is challenging, even when just trying to stick to main points, methods, and results. How do you approach articles and essays that are meant to be more persuasive or policy-related? So this may be related to one of the slides that you had earlier, but how do you deal with policy or persuasive-type papers? Yeah. So there's certainly an etiquette about scientific writing. And I think one has to be really careful about overemphasizing the quality or importance of somebody's work. I think the advocacy has to be somewhere else. And I think this won't surprise you, but I think the work and its utility and its message have to all speak for themselves. And the papers get noticed. But I think if you try to communicate briefly and with punch what you're really trying to say, you will draw enough people to you who will be interested. That's a very tough issue because one's institutions, for example, grandstand your work even if you don't. And so one has to be, in fact, really careful about that. I think it's okay to be an advocate of your work. My colleagues and I find this work exciting and interesting, and here's why. But I think there are limits to that. It's a very good question and a tough one. All right. Okay. So I do have a potential question for you while we're waiting for more questions from the participants. So you mentioned the issue of having too many authors in the byline, right? So how do authors overcome that problem given that consortia are becoming more popular? They're not becoming any less popular. So this issue is going to keep happening. What do we do about this issue as people who are submitting papers? Authors. I'm sorry. You were just to be certain. Authors with a byline for what? In a published paper, right? So when you have like 300 authors listed. Well, I think the scientific journalism world finds you if you have something to say. And also institutions, for example, would like to have you tweet and send out. And I just think you have to be careful. And what I try to do is to actually ask the journalist if I could possibly see what you're putting out, recognizing that I don't have any say. This is First Amendment stuff here. But the I would really try to control it as much as you can. And you can't do it all the way. You know, I just read, I'd like to add that I just read something today, which sort of surprised me is that there's a there's a movement in academia, if nowhere else, where some investigators have argued that the things that they put out on social media should potentially be evaluated as a as part of the corpus of their work. And I don't know that I'm there yet. But I'd have to think about that a little bit. I've only I only saw it today. I don't I don't know if it's a brand new idea. But since a lot of ideas are going straight to social media, somebody is going to say, well, I invented this and that, you know, on Facebook, and now I want credit. Well, I don't, you know, that's a long way. But But in any case, Uri, I saw a question about how to select journals. Yeah, those. Okay, let's do that one. I think we're running out of time. But it's very important. I think you should look for journals that are backed up by reputable publishers or professional organizations. There used to there used to be a couple of scientists who kept their version of a list of predatory journals, but that doesn't exist anymore. And I think this is interesting to me that that citation indices may be helpful in that not to find the ones that are 25 or 50. But you know, if there's a reasonable citation index, that's an in, that's an indicator that people are reading the work and probably of suitable quality, but I think you have to look at who's the publisher, who's the sponsor. And try to get a sense from the from the materials of the journal, what's going on, if somebody promises you 48 hour turnaround, they don't know the world, and I would stay away from Yeah, that was a good question. I think we're right at time. Yes. Thank you, Dr. Wallace. That was a great presentation. And Stephanie, I'm going to turn it over to you for any, any final comments from ACPM. Wonderful. Thank you very much. I want to send a huge thank you to Dr. Dudat for your moderating and to Dr. Wallace for this informative and insightful presentation. As a reminder, this recording will be uploaded to the ACPM Learning Management System. After this, we also wanted to invite you to a few of ACPM's upcoming webinars. Additional information about these webinars can be found on our website and in our newsletter. And you can also please feel free to reach out to ACPM staff. We also wanted to send a reminder to look out for the event survey, which we will send after this. And if you are interested in any of the other ACPM offerings, we invite you to check out our website at acpm.org, and our education and events page. And again, thank you to all of you. And we hope you have a wonderful afternoon. And thank you, Stephanie and Yuri. Take care. Take care, Stephanie. Bye. Thank you.

scientific report writing

scientific honesty

plagiarism

citations

authorship

predatory journals

writing clinics

reputable journals

clear purpose