Publication Implementation and Execution
This domain tests execution: turning an approved plan into accurate, approved, timely manuscripts and congress outputs. Questions focus on authorship, medical writing support, journal selection, submission, peer review, and tracking.
Authorship and contributor roles
- Apply the ICMJE four criteria early. Every author must meet all four; contributors who do not should be acknowledged, not listed.
- Use CRediT or a similar taxonomy to record contributor roles. Agree authorship order in writing before drafting and revisit only through a documented process.
- A professional medical writer is not automatically an author. Disclose the writer's name, affiliation, and funding in the acknowledgments, and include the writer in author meetings.
Draft, verify, and submit
- Draft from the protocol, SAP, tables/figures/listings, and CSR, not from a congress abstract alone. Verify every number against the source.
- Obtain statistical review and author approval of each version. Keep an audit trail of drafts, approvals, and data checks.
- Select journals on scope, audience, transparency policies, open-access route, turnaround, and reporting-guideline endorsement. Screen for predatory journals using recognized checklists.
- At submission, include accurate cover letters, prior-presentation disclosure, permissions, ORCID, ICMJE forms, and the appropriate checklist (CONSORT, STROBE, PRISMA).
- In peer review, respond point by point with evidence. Do not add post hoc analyses without a documented statistical rationale and author approval.
Congress execution
- Check embargo and prior-publication policies before submitting an abstract. Disclose prior presentation in later journal submissions and cite the abstract.
- Ensure the abstract and full manuscript are consistent; an abstract is a citable output, not a disposable draft.
Worked example
An abstract is accepted at a congress and the team immediately submits the full manuscript to a journal without mentioning the abstract. Reasoning: the journal's prior-publication policy must be checked. The cover letter should disclose the abstract and citation, and the manuscript must be substantially expanded, not a duplicate. Authors should confirm the embargo and retain approval records.
Traps that cost marks
- Deciding authorship after the draft is complete.
- Listing a medical writer as an author when the writer does not meet ICMJE criteria.
- Submitting to multiple journals simultaneously.
- Omitting medical-writing support from acknowledgments.
- Ignoring reporting guidelines or submitting an abstract-only dataset.
- Salami slicing one dataset into minimally different papers.