649CHAPTER 55
Publishing Your Simulation Work
WHY WRITE?
Umberto Eco said that writing for publication and having children allow one to overcome death (Safire & Safir, 1992). (This may be true, but I recommend writing an article. It is much cheaper than having children.) If your manuscript is listed in a database, such as the Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health (CINAHL) or PubMed, your work will still be there for others to find and read, long after you are gone. That is pretty powerful! An editor thought your manuscript was good enough to send out to your peers for review. Those reviewers critiqued your work and an editor published your manuscript as an article. You have made a contribution to the profession and perhaps even the world as a whole. One published article reaches many more people than a presentation at a conference ever will. You may receive emails from around the world as readers respond to your work. You may receive invitations to speak because publishing gives your thoughts legitimacy. People perceive you as an expert when you write and publish your work.
Publishing is an expectation in many academic roles. However, some of us work for academic programs in which publications are not an expectation. This does not mean you should not write, especially if you think you have something worthwhile to share with others. Some of the most creative simulation work today is being done in academic programs in which there is no expectation that faculty will publish. But they do it anyway. They feel compelled to write. What about you? Do you have something to say? How do you go about the task of writing a manuscript? How does one get published? This chapter reviews the steps of writing, writing in a team, submitting a manuscript for publication, and responding to reviewers.
To write well, it helps to be an avid reader. If you read your nursing journals, you will already know the literature and what is being published. If you are an avid reader, you will know what a sentence looks like and know when grammar is incorrect. (This seems simple but it is a big thing.) Many of us never write in full sentences anymore and do not know when we are mangling sentence structure. Many of us graduated before the American Psychological Association’s publication manual (APA, 2010) was written, the most often used style manual for nursing journals. If you do not know what APA is, it is time to buy or borrow the manual and read it; it is actually interesting and tells you how to write a scientific manuscript. (It is also useful for nonscientific articles.) OK, so you are buying in, getting excited, and ready to write … something…but what? Be thinking; and here are some other things to know.
There are now four major journals devoted to simulation. They are Advances in Simulation, BMJ Simulation, Clinical Simulation in Nursing, and Simulation in Healthcare. Most nursing and medical education journals also publish simulation articles. This provides a wide selection of places to publish for novice and experienced writers. How do you decide where to send your manuscript? Always consider who the audience is, for your story or work. Who needs to read what you are writing? Select the journal that best targets this audience. Some authors are under 650pressure to publish in a high impact factor journal, however, many authors are not under such constraints. The larger simulation community is served by considering the audience first.
WHAT TO WRITE?
There is a symbiotic relationship between editors and writers; editors have pages to fill with new and interesting things for their readers, and you, the writer, are the provider of these new and interesting things. Editors are happy to answer a query letter or email about an idea for a manuscript, however, this is not common practice anymore. It used to be “good form” to query an editor about a potential manuscript through email, but it is most common today to just submit a manuscript to a journal, with no earlier contact with the editor.
If you have presented a peer-reviewed poster, you probably have an outline for a good manuscript waiting for you to build on. Alternately, think about what you have done that might be of interest to others. Did you open a simulation center, invent a solution to a human patient simulator (HPS) or simulation problem, invent a novel simulation or game, get interdisciplinary buy-in from an unusual source, partner with another school or hospital in simulation on a project? All of these are worthy ideas for publication. Other nonresearch ideas recently published include optimizing space in a simulation center or moving a simulation center, group study for simulation certification, and simulation use in large classrooms. How do you know you have a publishable idea? Share it with an acquaintance. If he or she seem interested, check the simulation journals to see whether someone else has published a similar article. If someone has, all is not lost. Think about a different “slant” or approach on the same topic to make it fresh. Be creative.
Remember, there is usually more leeway allowed with manuscripts describing experiences, thought pieces, and so on. This is both a blessing and a curse. As a nonresearch article is less structured, it allows both the writer and the reviewer a larger chance for creativity. Try to be thorough in developing and reporting your ideas, leading the reader through a logical progression of thought and idea development.
Remember that reviewers for a specific journal are looking for a recognizable pattern. They read the journal all the time and expect manuscripts to read in a certain way. So, thoroughly study articles in your selected journal that are similar to what you want to write. There are different format expectations for general-interest articles, qualitative articles, and so on. Study the format and sentence structure of similar articles. Outline the paragraphs in a published article that is similar to the one you are writing to get a good sense of how the authors put the manuscript together. You will be expected to make your sentence structure and writing style match this format. If you do not, the journal reviewers, who are experts at what the journal sentence structure and syntax look like, will more than likely perceive “that something is wrong with the manuscript” (Regan & Pietrobon, 2010, p. 439). Taking the time to study similar articles before writing could save you a lot of time and rewriting in the long run.
Read and follow the journal guidelines for authors. If there is a section in your article that does not fit the guidelines, remove it. Or make it conform to what is required for the manuscript format. Reviewers and editors catch on very quickly to the fact that an article has been submitted in its entirety without any editing done to its original format.
RESEARCH WRITING AND REPORTING
Every paper you write while in a master’s or doctoral program should be considered a potential manuscript for publication somewhere. Your job is to tweak it to fit the requirements of the journal you choose to submit it to. Note, remove the professor’s comments and the final grade. (An editor does not care what grade your professor gave you.) The extensive literature reviews one completes in preparation for a research study or a program evaluation can be published as a free-standing article before the completion of the study or evaluation. Literature reviews are the most cited type of article, and are helpful to others, if done well. Editors and your fellow researchers love them.
651Use standardized definitions in your writing, based on either the new Simulation Dictionary (Lopreiato, 2016
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