Writing Your Best Paper

Annals of Surgery Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Keith Lillemoe, sat down with Lippincott to discuss a wide range of issues relating to authors, including writing for publication. Here is an excerpt from that interview.
Writing Your Best Paper
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Author challenges, author services, and writing your best paper

Lippincott:

A rather broad question for you: what would you say are some of the bigger challenges facing young authors today?

Dr. Lillemoe:

I think the big challenge, not just for an author, but to anybody who’s in academic surgery, is to have the right balance between the clinical demands, administrative demands, teaching demands, and time with your family. There’s only so much time in a day, and, unfortunately, the priority of getting a paper written and getting it revised amongst all the co-authors and all the work in putting a good manuscript together takes a lot of time. Sometimes the priority of writing a paper drops down the list. There’s a great sports quote: You never make the shot you never take. So, my recommendation is keep taking shots. Work on being a better author, work on getting a better team together to make your papers stronger, and make publishing papers a priority despite all the demands on your time. How to balance that priority amongst all the other demands that surgeons face, is a challenge. It is important to share knowledge, but it’s also important for your career to get promoted. So, if you just put in the time and effort and write a good paper, and it is important work, it’ll certainly get published.

Lippincott:

[Lippincott journals are mostly global and] receive submissions from around the world, often from individuals for whom English is a second language. Do you have any advice for these authors before they click Submit?

Dr. Lillemoe:

That is always a challenge. I would have no chance in the world of writing a paper in French or Italian or Chinese, so I admire them for trying…. In the end, it really, again, comes down to having a member of the team who can help prepare the article for the journal that you’re submitting it to. We refer constantly to having the paper reviewed by an English-speaking author, but that’s not always easy to find in every site across the world. Fortunately, with our relationship with Wolters Kluwer, we’ve developed services that can do an excellent job of preparing the manuscript in English for submission, and at a reasonable cost. This service improves the quality of the manuscript. There’s nothing worse than knowing that there’s a good paper somewhere buried in a submission that is hard to read and hard to understand due to language concerns. To have a professional service improve the paper to the point where that message is clear is so valuable to both the authors and to all of us who want to learn from their experiences.

Lippincott:

On a related note, if a reviewer sees a paper with good science, but frankly, poor English skills, what typically happens? Is that “revise and resubmit” or are they pointed to a tool or service of some sort?

Dr. Lillemoe:

If the science is there, and we can point out where the flaws are, the easiest response is to have it reviewed by an English-speaking author or use our service. For your average international author who doesn’t speak English, it probably helps them be a better author for the next paper they write.

Enhancing your chances: Advice from the Editor-in-Chief

Lippincott:

What easily avoidable mistakes do you most often see in submitted manuscripts? What’s the “low hanging fruit,” so to speak, that authors can easily address to enhance their chances of being published?

Dr. Lillemoe:

I think the best thing one can do to ensure that the manuscript is as strong as possible is to make sure all your co-authors have input early so that you can get the paper to a point where it addresses the issues that are important, defines the limitations, and clears up any controversy. There’s nothing worse than having a paper submitted and then finding out that some of the authors weren’t happy with how it was submitted or weren’t happy with the order of the authors. So, I think the best advice I would give is to revise your paper often with the input of your collaborators. Some of them will make the paper better grammatically, some of them will make it better scientifically, some of them will make it better statistically. Some will help you prioritize the points or correct the figures and tables. Writing a paper is seldom a one-person job. So, use your collaborators to the best of their ability to generate the best manuscript possible.

Lippincott:

You just answered my next question. I wanted to see if there are any suggestions for authors as they revise a paper.

Dr. Lillemoe:

Be responsive to the reviewers. The reviewers are another four to six eyes that look at the paper, provide input that you and your group might have missed. Don’t go into the process with such an ego that, “My paper’s fine as I submitted it, and it can’t be made better.” Learn from the input from the reviewers and try to make your paper better.


Read the interview in full.

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Go to the profile of OLUWAJIMI SODIPO
3 months ago

Thank you for the comments , getting the time to do all the work is really a concern , but the idea of having someone who can coordinate the material is good