Educational Scholarship: A Modern Guide to Dissemination

There are several critical steps to choosing and planning a scholarly project. Most imperative is to plan ahead. Other steps include crafting a question, performing a review of the literature within and outside of medicine, identifying a conceptual framework, obtaining institutional review board approval, and selecting outcomes.⁴  Readers are referred to Mills et al for elaboration, including further discussion of conceptual frameworks (eg, deliberate practice, reflective practice).⁴  Readers may also find utility in the FINER acronym (feasible, interesting, novel, ethical, and relevant) when crafting a research question.

Posters, oral presentations, and workshops at conferences are valuable entry points into medical education scholarship. Dissemination beyond conferences can be critically important for promotion and broader reach. As such, we will focus on opportunities for dissemination beyond conferences.

After developing your project, you must select a venue. As you navigate this process, there are several things to consider:

What type of project are you hoping to disseminate?

• Specific considerations include the site(s) of your study; is it single- or multicenter? Are you planning to collect data? If so, is your data qualitative or quantitative? If survey-based, what is the validity evidence for your survey? If intervention-based, how will you define success? Will the outcome and intervention be generalizable? Are you able to address feasibility issues?

What are your personal and professional goals for dissemination?

• Your answer to this question may range from promotion or personal education to circulation of novel curricula. The ideal venue for dissemination for promotion or tenure may differ from the venue selected to start or fuel a conversation. In cases of faculty working toward promotion on educational tracks, it is important to know your institution’s specific criteria.

Who is your ideal audience?

• Your audience includes the editor of your selected venue and any potential readers of your disseminated product. Most important is the scope and vision of your chosen journal. Do you see your project fitting into an ongoing conversation? Does your project add value to the body of knowledge in the field? If the journal’s reach is international, is your article of interest to an international audience? Is your audience made up of those in your specific field or is it more general? Do you hope to engage content experts, peers, trainees, and/or the public?

The answers to these questions may change but considering your goals from the start will provide a foundation from which to set your efforts into motion.

A wide array of medical education-focused, medical education-adjacent, and general education-focused journals exist. The Association of American Medical Colleges has cataloged an extensive list of potential journals for publication of medical education materials, and at first, the extent of your options may be overwhelming.⁶  To narrow your choices, read journals of interest and pay attention to the articles’ content and the authors’ phrasing. You may notice similarities to themes in your own work that can help with venue selection. If you choose to go this route and seek additional guidance with journal selection, consider using the Journal/Author Name Estimator⁷  Web site to generate a list of venues on the basis of your work’s title or abstract. Having a list of target journals is beneficial, so in the eventuality of a rejection, you already know the subsequent journal for submission. The above questions about audience and “fitting in” are particularly important here. Make sure your study adds to the overall conversation curated by the journal.

The most traditional route to scholarship is through publication of a manuscript in a journal. Nearly all journals accept full-length, original articles. However, successful submissions in this category often involve multicenter studies or extremely innovative work on a critically important topic at a single institution.

Many medical education journals also publish brief reports, which focus on describing the problem addressed, what was tried, and what was learned. These are ideal opportunities for the submission of single-center and/or pilot study data. The “Really Good Stuff” section in Medical Education solicits ≤500-word articles and focuses on lessons learned from an intervention without requiring that authors demonstrate success of the intervention.⁸  Submissions are reviewed in batches and published twice per year (due May 1 and November 1). Similarly, the “New Ideas” section in the Journal of Graduate Medical Education accepts ≤600-word submissions, with a call released each summer for submissions due in the fall.⁹ 

Not all publications in medical education require study designs and data. Many of the most highly read and shared articles focus on communicating tips, tricks, and thoughts on teaching effectively to colleagues and peers. Most medical education journals accept perspective pieces that allow authors to reflect on key moments in their educational career, and several journals offer more formal options for publishing expository work. Workshops presented at educational conferences can be excellent fodder for these submissions. For members of the Council on Medical Student Education in Pediatrics, an internal call for a quarterly column in Pediatrics is released annually for pieces that review practical skills and techniques that pediatricians can immediately put into use.¹⁰  The “Last Page” section of Academic Medicine accepts submissions of 1-page infographics illustrating key topics or concepts in medical education.¹¹  Lastly, the “12 Tips” section of Medical Teacher accepts pieces with 12 main paragraphs (1 for each tip) on an individual educational objective or area.¹²  Other medical education journals, such as The Clinical Teacher and Medical Science Educator, also accept articles on teaching tips or commentaries. Readers are encouraged to explore the many other types of manuscripts detailed in the Association of American Medical Colleges report, including “Mythology,” “When I Say…,” and “Failures/Surprises.”⁶ 

Because the medical field uses more online resources for education, new possibilities for the dissemination of scholarly work have developed (Table 1). In fact, the use of digital media can allow one to maximize the scholarly output of a project. For example, a novel educational curriculum could be presented at a conference, published in a journal, uploaded to a digital learning platform, and transformed into a video demonstration distributed on social media (Fig 1).

Along with the increased flexibility of these venues comes an increased personal responsibility to disseminate meaningful work. Authors must continue to use Glassick’s criteria to ensure their projects are scholarly and readers must critically evaluate disseminated works, particularly those that do not undergo peer review.²  Several groups have worked to develop scoring systems to assess new/digital scholarship. The Social Media Index uses online followership counts and Web site rankings to assess quality, and the calculated Social Media Index correlates with a traditional journal’s impact factor. Two other scoring systems called Academic Life in Emergency Medicines’ Approved Instructional Resource and revised Medical Education Translational Resources: Impact and Quality were found to correlate highly with expert educator gestalt.¹³ 

MedEdPORTAL offers an open-access and PubMed-indexed, digital opportunity for dissemination of medical curricula or discrete educational activities and materials. Unlike some curricular repositories, MedEdPORTAL maintains a peer review process for publication and offers advising to authors hoping to submit their work. Submissions to MedEdPORTAL must include a report of a complete and evaluated curriculum with all materials necessary for implementation at another institution.¹⁴ 

Social media platforms are increasingly used for dissemination of original works, as well as for increased exposure of more traditionally disseminated materials. For example, converting a lecture given at a resident conference into a podcast and sharing the podcast via social media could significantly expand the audience for your work. Additional opportunities for dissemination to social media platforms include short, multimedia posts to Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, and more detailed blog posts. Readers may specifically hear the term FOAM, which stands for free open access medical education, as a category for such work. Endearingly coined by an emergency medicine physician in an Irish pub in the early 2010s, FOAM encompasses the myriad of easily accessible online resources for medical education ranging from podcasts to blogs to social media.¹³ 

Once you have selected your target venue, you can focus your writing to match the style of the venue. For specific types of submissions, consider the following tips.

Every journal has detailed instructions for the content and format of manuscripts. Many journal editors also publish lists of common errors made by authors when submitting manuscripts.¹⁵  Becoming familiar with each of these will help you to be diligent with your preparation and avoid common pitfalls leading to manuscript rejection. Aside from not following author instructions, one of the top issues is poor writing quality. Readers are referred to “The Writer’s Craft” series in Perspectives on Medical Education, which offers particularly useful guidance on improving writing habits and clarity. The “Problem, Gap, Hook” framework for organizing introductions is but 1 of many helpful examples.¹⁶ 

It is important to have colleagues you can ask to provide informal peer-review of your work before submitting. On the other hand, you cannot let the desire for perfection be the enemy of good. No matter how masterfully crafted your sentences are, reviewers will always suggest changes. After appropriate review, submit your manuscript so you can move on to the next project. Rejection should not be seen as the end to an article, but rather as critical feedback to inform revision and resubmission to a different venue.

With newer/digital forms of dissemination, your approach to writing will depend on the venue. If you are preparing a blog post, you should follow the same tips as for traditional publications. You want to craft a compelling blog post, but also ensure it is reviewed by others before publishing the blog.

Social media sites that use a character count limit, such as Twitter, require thoughtful preparation. Use an infographic to draw attention from your followers or consider crafting a “tweetorial.” The post and graphic must complement one another. It helps to read posts by social media influencers to get a sense for how to write in a provocative and impactful manner.

Podcasts continue to gain popularity as a form of dissemination of medical education scholarship. If you are new to podcasts, it may help to write a script for what you want to discuss. As time goes on, keeping an outline of salient points you want to make helps encourage conversational language.

Dissemination of scholarship is a vital, yet often daunting, endeavor for the academic clinician–educator and is necessary for the forward progression of our field. Abundant and ever-changing opportunities for dissemination exist. In this article, we have broadly discussed an approach to the selection of venues for dissemination, relying on careful planning from the outset and practical consideration of your goals and intended audience (Table 2). Done well, dissemination of your scholarly work can create conversation, open doors, and benefit both you and the larger medical education community.

We thank Dr Rebecca Sanders, Dr Adam Cohen, and Dr Suzanne Reed for their input on this article.