From research to publication

How to do great research, get it published, and improve health outcomes

About 85% of health research is wasted, usually because it asks the wrong questions, is badly designed, not published or poorly reported. Many causes of this waste are simple problems that could easily be fixed, such as appropriate randomisation or blinding of a clinical trial.

And then there’s waste in publishing. Editors reject papers because research questions and methods are poor, and papers get retracted because they’re unusable or untrustworthy.

The University of California, San Francisco and BMJ have teamed up to develop an eLearning programme for clinical and public health researchers called Research to Publication. This is a comprehensive eLearning programme on developing skills in clinical and public health research and getting studies published quickly, transparently, and ethically.

One or more of the following courses may help you:

1. How to develop and report good research questions
2. Developing and writing protocols
3. Choosing the best study design
4. How to do ethical research
5. How to write a research paper
6. The essentials of running a clinical trial
7. Picking the right journal and getting published
8. Avoiding scientific misconduct

Visit rtop.bmj.com for more information.

You can also read more about research publication in this blog post by Trish Groves, published on the LSE blog, or visit the section on ‘Writing your paper’.