Preparing reports for publication and responding to reviewers' comments.

This article is based on a chapter of a new book, Clinical Epidemiology: How to Do Clinical Practice Research, which is about designing and conducting practical research in clinical settings. Those most likely to benefit from our suggestions are early in their academic careers (the ‘‘you’’ in the following discussion), though we hope more senior clinician-scientists will also identify some helpful advice. Publishing the findings of your research in high prestige, peer-reviewed journals is the sine qua non of academic success, short of, say, a Nobel Prize. Although it would be nice to believe that the intrinsic merit of your research is the main determinant of whether your article is published in a given journal, many other factors bear on this, including the target audience of the journal, the number of articles published by the journal compared with the number of manuscripts received (‘‘rejection rate’’), whether the journal has recently published something on the same topic, whether the findings are ‘‘positive’’ or ‘‘negative,’’ whether the findings are ‘‘newsworthy’’ in the view of the editor, which reviewers assess your article, how well you have written the article, and dumb luck (good or bad). You can do something about most of these factors (Table 1). Sooner or later, you can get virtually any paper accepted by some journal, but this chapter discusses some ways to increase your chances of having your papers accepted sooner rather than later, and by higher prestige journals.