Research is your friend, not your foe: here's why

Picture this in your mind for a minute. You are standing in the middle of a large parking lot at your local grocery store or big box retailer. The entire parking lot is covered with 10 inches of snow, and you have been tasked with removing all the snow with only a snow shovel. Do I have your attention? Are your nerves a little on edge?

This is what it felt like to me the first time I was asked to be lead author on a scientific manuscript. My then boss, Dr. Barry Carter, an international expert in hypertension and team-based care research, walked up to my desk and informed me I would be the lead author on one of the manuscripts for a research project we were doing involving clinical pharmacists independently managing high blood pressure at the local Veteran’s Administration (VA). He didn’t even give me the opportunity to politely decline. He just told me to have an outline to him the following week.

The best way to get started is to get help

Well, a week passed, and I had nothing but chicken scratches in a notebook. I went into his office utterly disappointed in myself knowing I had let him down. I rattled off what I had written waiting for him to explain what a disgrace I was to the profession. Instead, he provided reassuring feedback there was hope for me as a scientific author. We finalized an outline, he provided some additional tips for how to take the next steps, and my next deadline was to email him a rough draft 2 weeks later.

A few days after I emailed him my first draft, we met to review my work. Dr. Carter had in his hand a printed version of my work strewn with red ink (he preferred to edit by hand an in red ink). He meticulously walked me through each comment and edit explaining his reasons why. By the end of the session, I felt comfort, and some confidence, in my ability to be successful at this venture. I was also very aware of the importance of high-quality scientific literature and how what we were doing might shape the future of patient care.

My guess is not all of you reading this are great at writing manuscripts. Maybe the thought if it makes you physically ill. I get it. The saving grace is you don’t have to go through it alone. Academic institutions are a great resource for help with research. Often there are faculty members looking for opportunities to collaborate on research projects, analyze data, and help write manuscripts. Heck, many of them need additional publications to add to their dossier when they are up for promotion.

My advice to you

If you are interested in manuscript writing and don’t know where to begin, start by looking for a researcher in an academic setting with similar interest (College of Pharmacy, College of Medicine, College of Public Health, etc). Maybe you will find it not as daunting as you think, like I did.