Publishing in the Medical Sciences: Home

Welcome to Publishing in the Medical Sciences, a guide focusing on scholarly publishing within the biomedical disciplines. This guide is intended for use by medical professionals (both students & faculty) and identifies procedures for preparing research and allocating it to select publications. Specifically, this involves:

• Describing the role of scholarly publishing in the medical community
• Comparing and contrasting the different publishing models currently in use
• Listing the essential steps for equipping an article for publication after its composition
• Identifying potential journals and publishers for publication of your work 

Resources in this guide will also provide direct links to materials available through the library that correspond to publishing your own research. Items such as books, articles, other research guides, and visual tutorials can help you situate your research in the most appropriate ways.  

All serious scholars must promote their ideas to take part in the discourse of a given discipline. For professionals in the health sciences, this requires the contribution of research findings to the pool of available knowledge. Such knowledge not only adds to the existing literature, but equips institutions with the information needed to better serve the population. For the individual in the medical sciences there are other reasons to publish, namely:  

• A scholar's published work acts as a metric in the promotion process
• Institutional assessment is often based on the publishing records of their research programs
• Grants and other sources of funding require that research be published
• Facilitating your work for publication helps refine your professional expertise on trending research

While writing and publishing often go together, they are not always the same thing. The information on this guide deals more exclusively with the publication process. See this guide for information on the particulars of writing and drafting a research report.