• Core Purpose: The foundation of academic life is the generation and dissemination of new knowledge and findings.
• The Agreement: As researchers, we must agree to write and publish.
• The Principle: “From quantity comes quality.”
  • Consistent output is necessary for junior academicians to acquire proficiency in drafting, submission, and negotiating with reviewers.

• Analysis of academicians with Zero Publications points to systemic gaps, often masked as personal “excuses” which might be VALID:
  • Excuse: No time \(\rightarrow\) Symptom: Unbalanced teaching loads; lack of protected writing time.
  • Excuse: No team/No post-graduate students \(\rightarrow\) Symptom: Professional isolation; lack of supervisory capacity.

• Analysis of academicians with Zero Publications points to systemic gaps, often masked as personal “excuses” which might be VALID:
  • Excuse: No projects or grants \(\rightarrow\) Symptom: Lack of institutional funding support.
  • Excuse: No motivations \(\rightarrow\) Symptom: Possible absence of a supportive culture.
• Conclusion: Address the structural barriers to solve the productivity problem.

• Language Barrier: Academic English is often described as a challenge for all scientists, including native speakers.
• Complexity: Dealing with writing complexity, particularly for non-native English speakers, can be overwhelming.
• Isolation: The tendency toward professional isolation, often exacerbated by taking criticism personally, delays essential critique until the peer review stage.
• Solution: Foster a culture of collaboration and resilience.

• Science is Collaborative: Academic writing should be a group effort, not a solitary struggle.
• Letting Go: High-impact writing necessitates letting go of the perception that all words must be solely one author’s creation.
• Find Your Team: Seek out national and international teams to expand your network and thematic focus.

• Proactive Critique: Actively seek comments on drafts from co-authors, and colleagues before submission.
• The Mindset Shift: Feedback must be welcomed as a “valuable source of professional growth,” not internalized as personal criticism.
• The Reality: Reviewers often criticize the writing of even prolific, native English-speaking academics.
• The Motto: We are all “perpetual learners, forever refining our craft.”

To achieve success, researchers need proficiency across four key areas:

1. Design Skills: How good are you at designing robust studies?
2. Drafting Skills: How good are you at structuring and drafting papers?
3. Writing Proficiency: Mastery of complex academic writing.
4. Submission and Management: Competence in submitting papers and effectively handling the often long process of dealing with reviewer comments.

• Purpose: Research metrics serve as proxies for multidimensional concepts such as quality and impact, but no single number captures the whole story.
• Golden Rule 1: Holistic Assessment: Always incorporate both qualitative input (expert opinion) and quantitative input (metrics) for decisions.

• Golden Rule 2: Multimetric Approach: Never assess performance using a single metric, as all indicators have inherent strengths and weaknesses.
• Database Dependence: Results are entirely dependent on the underlying database (Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar) and cannot be directly compared across different tools.

• Attempts to Measure: Quality and quantity of an author’s work.
• Definition: An author has an h-index of \(h\) if \(h\) of their papers have received at least \(h\) citations.
• Strength: Easy to calculate and incorporates both output and citation influence.

• Total number of citations received.
• Citation Benchmarking (percentile of similar articles).
• Field-weighted Citation Impact (FWCI).
• PlumX Metrics: Captures broader societal engagement data, including mentions in news, blogs, and social media.

• Academic Output: Intellectual contributions within academia (e.g., h-index, citation counts, JIF).
• Research Impact: The positive effect, influence, or benefit that research has on areas beyond academia.
• The Conflict: Fixating on academic metrics subverts the primary goal of health research—benefiting patients, policy, or society.
• The Mandate: Funding agencies demand evidence of impact beyond conventional academic boundaries.

• Definition: Research that informs rules established by policymakers to govern behavior.
• How Scientists Contribute: Submitting evidence, helping to develop national/local policies, or serving on expert consultation panels.
• Example: Canadian research on injury risk in youth hockey contributed to a policy change to delay body checking until 13-14 years of age.

• Definition: Commercialization, healthcare cost savings through reduced morbidity/mortality, or the monetary value of improved health outcomes.
• Example: UK research on multifaceted physiotherapy for low back pain yielded an estimated £130 million Return on Investment (ROI) in improved quality of life and reduced healthcare costs.

• Definition: Public value, utility, societal relevance, or changes in community health behavior/Quality of Life (QOL).
• Example: The GLA:D program for hip and knee osteoarthritis, implemented through education and exercise, led to patients reporting more physical activity and taking less sick leave and fewer pain medications.

1. Lengthy Time Lag: The interval between research dissemination and practical impact can be extensive
2. Causality: The effects are often indirect, cumulative, and incremental, making it difficult to isolate the causal effect of a single research project.
3. Lack of Standardization: A gap concerning standardized, empirically validated measures adopted broadly across the research community.

Effective strategy requires synergistic action at three levels, addressing the “No time, No team, No grants” problems:

• Individual Authors: Disciplined execution of missions and goals.
• Author Teams: Formalized governance and collaborative culture.
• Institutions: Structural support, protected time, and revised reward systems.

• Define Mission (3-5 Years): Set comprehensive goals (e.g., target percentage of papers in SCOPUS or WOS).
• Set Goals (Annual/Monthly): Translate missions into granular targets, such as minimum number of manuscripts as first author or corresponding author.

• Proactive Resource Acquisition: Focus effort on securing grants and obtaining postgraduate students as soon soon as possible; these resources are foundational for overcoming zero productivity.
• Persistence (Istiqamah): Recognize that the path from initial writing to final acceptance is a long process and requires patience and consistent effort.

• Refine Core Competencies: Dedicate time to improving all four critical skills: study design, paper drafting, writing complexity, and submission/management.
• Use Foundational Papers: When initiating a draft, refer to 2-3 main papers for structure and approach, replicating methodological aspects where appropriate, but strictly avoiding plagiarism.

• Seek Support Systems: Utilize your University Writing Center (UWC) or other services for assistance on writing mechanics, structure, and clarity, helping to mitigate language barriers.
• Leverage Technology: Use AI-powered scientific research assistants and other tools to help improve drafting efficiency and address complexity barriers.

• General LLM Claude, chatGPT, Gemini
• Google NotebookLM
• Trinka AI
• Paperpal

• Formalize Agreements: Create clear, short policies for key issues (e.g., authorship and publication) at the start of a project
• Adopt Authorship Standards: Utilize industry-wide frameworks for defining contribution and authorship :
  • ICMJE Guidelines:
  • CRediT Taxonomy (NISO): Contributor Roles Taxonomy.
• Set Collective Goals: Define shared team missions and clearly articulate the team’s core research themes

• Transparent Communication: Team members must openly communicate their capacity to contribute to a manuscript and proactively support one another.
• Conflict Moderation: Establish mechanisms for active delegation of writing tasks and a process for lead authors and team.
• Writing Accountability Groups (WAGs): Form small groups to help members build sustainable and consistent writing habits.

• Protected Time: Implement policies for differential or unbalanced teaching loads to ensure faculty have time dedicated to scholarship.
• Research Reassignment: Offer departmental or school-level research reassignment awards specifically to create protected time for writing.

• Simplify Financial Support: Ensure research funding is budgeted, grant application access is simplified, and clear financial support, particularly for high-cost Article Processing Charges (APCs), is provided.

• Retain Experience: Consider increasing the retirement age or recruiting retired renowned national/international scholars as dedicated mentors.
• Practical Support for ECRs: Provide practical support in proposal writing, ethics applications, project management, and academic writing to help overcome common early barriers.

• Structured Training: Provide targeted, structured trainings and workshops for medical faculty, covering topics like writing mechanics, structuring arguments, editing, and publishing.
• Revise Promotion Criteria: Restructure faculty evaluation and promotion criteria to explicitly measure and reward documented Policy, Economic, and Societal Impact alongside traditional academic output (h-index, citations).

• Crucial Institutional Change: Restructure faculty evaluation and promotion criteria.
• Shift Focus: Move beyond solely rewarding traditional academic output (h-index, citations) which favor seniority.

• Explicitly Measure and Reward: Documented Policy, Economic, and Societal Impact alongside traditional academic output, thereby aligning institutional incentives with the public mission of health research and external funder demands.