PREPARING SCIENTIFIC MANUSCRIPT (AND GETTING IT

ACCEPTED)

Marko TurinaUniversity of Zurich

Switzerland

Some material provided by Ian Beecroft Publishing (IB)

http://www.ianbeecroftconsulting.com/

A. Fundamental questions

What do you have to say?Is it worth saying?What is the right format?What is the audience?What is the right journal?

You have some interesting data and want to publish them: say 300

aortic valve replacements in poor LV function without mortality (?)

First, check you data carefully: are your results really true? Are your mortalities assessed according to current guidelines (every editor will ask you this question, unless you stated it in text):

Guidelines for reporting mortality and morbidity after cardiac valve interventions. Cary W. Akins, D. Craig Miller, Marko I. Turina, Nicholas T. Kouchoukos, Eugene H. Blackstone, Gary L. Grunkemeier, Johanna J.M. Takkenberg, Tirone E. David, Eric G. Butchart, David H. Adams, David M. Shahian, Siegfried Hagl, John E. Mayer, and Bruce W. LytleJ. Thorac. Cardiovasc. Surg., Apr 2008; 135: 732 - 738.

Today, there are no excuses for missing important information in the

published literature

Thorough search of literature is essential before preparing a scientific publication (no sense in reinventing the wheel):

• CTSNet journals• HighWire Press• Medline• Ovid• Pubmed

You have collected the data and would like to write a manuscript: how to

proceed?First, analyze your data carefully: the

essence of science is the analysis. Do not simply unload your data into tables and figures, add text, and send it somewhere.

“Observations are useless until they have been interpreted. The analysis of experimental data forms a critical stage in every scientific inquiry – a stage which has been responsible for most of the foolishness and fallacies of the past”

E. Bright Wilson, An Introduction to Scientific Research.

Remember questions which every editor asks when he receives a new

clinical manuscript

• Is it a consecutive series of patients (operations, treatments, etc.)?

• Are all patients with a particular condition included, or were patients selected for the described procedure?

• Specify selection criteria (i.e. which patients were excluded or included).

Have these question in mind when preparing a manuscript!

Start your work by carefully reading instructions for manuscript submission

EJCTS instructions for manuscript submission

EJCTS instructions for manuscript submission

Try to avoid abbreviations: they make your manuscript difficult to read, and are usually

unnecessary

”Cardioplegia (C) is a type of ischemia-reperfusion injury (IR), usually it is connected with hypothermia (H). IR causes myocardial stunning (MS). MS occurring after IR has been extenisively investigated, both the metabolic consequences (MC), the gene programs (GP) activated, the ione shifts (IS) occurring, etc. ”

“The role of MC, GP, and IS in C-induced IR is not fully known, neither are the exact cellular events of MS. HCA is important to protect the heart”

After Jarle Vaage, Prague 2008

A word of caution about dictate of statistics in today's

literature.

Do not be misled by statistical associations: they can be completely erroneous

Courtesy of Pieter Kappetein, EACTS

Beware of multiple subgroup analysis!!

Circulation 1980; 61(3):508-15

Simple rules which you should remember when attacking your data with a massive statistical effort.

(“Torture the data until they confess….”).

• Statistical end result (p value, Χ2) shows only the degree of association; it says nothing whatsoever about causal relationship.

• Beware of “Post hoc, propter hoc” logic: temporal relationship of two variables (one occurring after the other) does not mean that it is a “cause and effect” relation.

• With large hospital data banks now required by law in many countries, “data mining” can deliver some significant results, but results are only valid if a previously determined hypothesis is being evaluated.

Watch your numbers when writing manuscript!

From a recently submitted manuscript (it was rejected)

Check your English when writing manuscript!What is “idoneous”? Explanation: Latin for “suitable”

For authors who are not native English speakers, it is a good practice to elicit help from expert translator/assistant

Check your English when writing manuscript!Avoid strange abbreviations!

In statistics, use numbers which were actually measured, not calculation-derived artifacts. This

error is surprisingly common in many submissions.

Do not write:• Cardiac output was 5.389 ± 0.439 L/min• Blood pressure increased from 138.916 ± 31.937 …• Positive effect was observed in 55.6 % of patients …• Avoid percentages in small numbers (< 30)

Instead, use:• Cardiac output was 5.4 ± 0.4 L/min• Blood pressure increased from 139 ± 32 …..• Positive effect was observed in 5/9 patients.

After Jarle Vaage, Prague 2008

Refrain from statistical tricks: shown are same results, with SEM on the left, with 95

% confidence limits on the right.

mean ± SEM mean ± 95% confidence intervals

After Jarle Vaage, Prague 2008

When dealing with small numer of observations, use scatter plots and

median values

After Jarle Vaage, Prague 2008

Beware of two deadly sins in scientific publishing:

Plagiarism

Redundant (duplicate) publication

Simple plagiarism check with Google Scholar from a recent publication

Simple plagiarism check with Google Scholar: Quick results

In US, plagiarism is a punishable offense, with a governmental agency supervising research, and taking

administrative actions.

Beware of two deadly sins in scientific publishing:

Plagiarism

Redundant (duplicate) publication

All 6 conditions must be met to declare a publication as a duplicate one.

Another bad practice is “Salami publishing” or “Parma manuscripts”

(thinly sliced material)

Your data should be submitted fully; do not try to send a part of it to one journal and the other part to another one. Editors talk to each other, and they meet often; so this action will be detected, and will give you a black eye as author. This particular practice is often used to inflate author’s publication list; but it is detested by editors because it burdens journals with similar material.

A. Authorship

• Omission – major contributors left out• Ghost – a company ghost writes the

paper – exposes a conflict of interest• Guest – important name• Gift - sycophantic invitation• Non-consultation – some authors not

shown final version

• All of above can cause BIG conflicts!

Authorship rules are nowadays very strict: no more honorary authorships!

Manuscript’s authorship: some advices

• Settle all authorship problems before beginning to write the manuscript: you will save yourself a lot of trouble later.

• First author is the researcher who performed most of the work, and/or wrote most of the manuscript.

• Senior author is acknowledged to be the originator of the idea/hypothesis, or is leading the group which is submitting the manuscript.

• Having performed some or even a large part of surgeries described in the manuscript does not necessarily qualify for authorship, unless other criteria are met.

B. Ten common reasons for rejection

1. Unoriginal work2. Unsound work3. Incorrect journal4. Incorrect format5. Incorrect type

allocation6. Previous rejection7. Slicing & Duplication8. Plagiarism (=

copying)9. Unready work10. English so bad it’s

ambiguous

Unsound work:

Experimental set-up flawed

Statistical analysis flawed: inadequate controls, hypothesis not adequately tested

Evidence/suggestion of scientific fraud or data manipulation!

Retrospective studies are limited in terms of their experimental set-up – i.e. no randomisation or control group etc. – therefore rarely make it into top journals

REJECTEDREJECTED

!!!!

Previous rejection:

• Previous rejections often resubmitted to same journal – detected by duplicate search

• Previous rejections from other journals often badly disguised – cover letter, wrong (other journal) format

• Both of above bad psychology

RE-RE-REJECTED!!REJECTED!!

Serious consequences

Responding to reviewers

Prepare your responses carefully Reviewer can be wrong! Be tactful and enthusiastic – thank the

reviewers Do not respond to reviewers while

upset Get help from other authors Get help from a statistician (if required) Never telephone the editor

Example - point-by-point response

1. The authors should give more detail of the methodology. Two sentences were added to clarify the process (para 2 on p. 3).

2. Figures 2&3 legends are transposed. The legends for Figures 2&3 have been corrected.

3. Units should be SI and in a standard format throughout. Units standardized SI eg. mg s-1

throughout.

What not to do when submitting a manuscript

• Start discussion with the editor to be exempted from the journal’s rules (number of authors, or literature citations, or word count - because you are obviously so important). You manuscript will be quickly returned.

• Explain that a similar version has been presented elsewhere, or has already been published, but you added some patients/experiments/numbers. Editors want originality for their journals.

• Unsuccessfully disguise previous rejection of the same material by another journal (e.g. send “Ultra Mini-Abstract” to EJCTS – where it is needed only in JTCVS).

• In accompanying letter address editor of the journal you are submitting, not of the other journal which rejected your first version.

Inacceptable behaviour in publishing

Author submitted manuscript to a mediocre journal. He receives request for revision, with detailed comments by the reviewers, which are very useful for improving the manuscript. Author simply does not communicate with this journal anymore, uses comments for improving his manuscript, and sends it to a journal with higher Impact Factor. There are no punishments foreseen for this breach of trust, but author enters editor’s private black list, and he communicates his observation to other editors (which meet several times each year).

A good manuscript concentrates on essentials,

and avoids long-winded explanations.

The best way to be boring is to leave nothing out.

Voltaire (1694 -1778)

What is the lesson here? You can win Nobel prize for medicine with a 3 ½ pages article, with 15

references.So, make your manuscripts short, containing only essential details.

Avoid verbiage!