“Hell isn’t merely paved with good intentions; it’s walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.” ~ Aldous Huxley Several years ago, a New York Times blog described a conflict of interest in which three prominent scientists received an unrestricted grant[a] from the Coca-Cola Company to conduct research and convene an international consortium of scientists to address issues of
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In previous iterations of this series, I’ve given advice about writing the results and discussion sections of your manuscript for submission to the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice (JPHMP). Arguably, I’ve saved the most important section for the third in the series, as the methods section of your manuscript contains the material that most people will use to
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Most masters of public health (MPH) graduates who remain in public health will become practitioners rather than researchers. Most tenure-track faculty are hired and retained for their research acumen, especially those in medical schools and schools of public health. As such, one of the conundrums that faces faculty members in public health programs is how to best prepare future public
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Writing a manuscript for publication can be time-consuming and taxing work. However, once you have a manuscript ready for submission to a journal, there is still work to be done. First, you need to identify a journal to submit the manuscript to, which I’ve covered in detail before. Second, you’ll want to craft a cover letter to bring the manuscript
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Ostensibly, the results section of an article should be the easiest to write. The analysis section of the manuscript tells the reader what the authors did with the data, and the results section simply presents the output of those analyses in a format that is, at least hypothetically, easy to understand and interpret. Unfortunately, things that are hypothetically one way don’t
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I’ve long joked that graduate study is marked at the beginning by reading only the introduction and discussion sections of scientific articles, and at the end by reading only the methods and results sections. This is obviously not entirely accurate, but it represents the transition from wondering what others think about what they found to forming your own opinion of
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Thomson Reuters has released the 2016 Journal Citation Reports®, which contain Impact Factors for all of the 11,000-plus journals that they index. As usual, it has caused a high level of mass consternation. As the sky is most certainly not falling, despite indications otherwise, I felt obligated to chime in and let you know a little secret: it’s not the
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One of the most oft-repeated statements in the academy is “I really should be writing.” It has even evolved into a number of humorous memes that you shouldn’t search for (since you should be writing). Despite the ubiquity of frustrations over self-sabotage of the writing process, there are a number of productive scholars who successfully produce a robust body of
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One of the most oft-repeated statements in the academy is “I really should be writing.” It has even evolved into a number of humorous memes that you shouldn’t search for (since you should be writing). Despite the ubiquity of frustrations over self-sabotage of the writing process, there are a number of productive scholars who successfully produce a robust body of
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Ostensibly, this question should be easy to answer. One answer might be that a scientist is someone trained in the scientific method who applies that knowledge to the conduct of research. Unfortunately, the proliferation of social media and other platforms for dissemination and criticism of scientific studies has blurred the line considerably. For example, some definitions of “scientist” you might
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