Publication Planning & Scholarship

Publications and scholarships are opportunities to share key learnings from a quality improvement project beyond our team or institution. It involves documenting and communicating your project through journal publications, posters and/or oral presentations at conferences and can also take place in informal settings. It is a powerful way to spread your project by sharing lessons learned and your improvement journey, so others can understand what worked, what did not, and how to apply similar changes in their own settings.

It is highly recommended to plan out this process in the early phases of the project to effectively track and shared lessons learned through scholarship efforts. If you are considering presenting or publishing results, be sure to submit your project or initiative to the Institutional Review Board (IRB).

Key Steps

• Plan for scholarship from the start: Clarify your aim; determine your family of measures and how you’ll measure your impact; and align your project with frameworks like the SQUIRE guidelines or other journal-specific requirements.
• Document as you go: Keep track of PDSA cycles, data, context, adaptations, and lessons learned throughout the project rather than waiting until the end of your project.
• Engage mentors and potential collaborators: Involve experienced colleagues who can support writing, editing, and selecting appropriate venues for dissemination.
• Choose the appropriate audience for your scholarly work: Tailor your message to the audience your want to reach and decide your format accordingly (i.e. poster, presentation, or publication).

Resources to Get Started

Read	SQUIRE 2.0 Guidelines – SQUIRE stands for Standards for Quality Improvement Reporting Excellence. The SQUIRE guidelines provide a framework for reporting new knowledge about how to improve healthcare. They are intended for reports that describe system level work to improve the quality, safety and value of healthcare. Defining the Role of Authors and Contributors – The article from International Committee of Medical Journal Editors helps provide guidance on how to define roles for journal authors and contributions. This is an often overlooked step in the publication planning process.
Use	The UNC Children’s Clinical Portal – this central repository of clinical pathways and guideline documents to decrease practice variation and maximize the quality of care delivered by UNC physicians, advanced practice providers, and nurses who care for children across the state. JANE (Journal/Author Name Estimator) – This online resource helps determine a journal “home” for your paper. Simply paste in the title or abstract, click on “Find Journals” and a list of best-matched journals will be generated for you. JANE can also help you find relevant articles to cite in your paper or authors to review your paper.
Watch	IHQI Symposium Presentations – We host an annual Symposium for our Improvement Scholars and Fellows program. These could be examples of how you can present your presentations at conferences and other scholarly events.  University of Wisconsin and the Health Innovation Program – This site contains several resources to help clinicians publish the results of their quality improvement work within healthcare organizations and also includes a short overview video (2:43)

Related QI Concepts

• Data Collection Planning – A data collection plan will help your team identify key data points to measure and track throughout the duration of your project rather than rushing data collection in the end.
• Data Visualization & Analysis – Graphs and charts can be powerful tools that you can use to demonstrate the impact of your project in your publications and scholarly work.
• Project Charter – It is helpful to incorporate publication planning and scholarship early on in your project and list this milestone within in your project charter.
• Presenting QI Projects – One common method for sharing scholarly work is through presentations.