Category Archives: Family Medicine Journal

Crafting Narratives for Publication

Posted on October 27, 2025 by | Leave a comment

By Sara Shields, MD
associate editor,
Family Medicine

You’ve had a defining clinical, teaching, or learning experience in your role as a family physician educator, clinician or student.  Someone suggests that you write about it. Here are some pearls for crafting your reflective piece in hopes of publication in a journal like Family Medicine that accepts such narrative work.

  • What story are you trying to tell? Just as with any written piece, consider first your content. What are your key themes (keeping in mind that any word limit may mean focusing on just one theme)?  Consider the readership of the journal—how would a medical student on a family medicine rotation respond to your story? How would a seasoned family medicine faculty member?
  • Avoid judgment–In general, an effective narrative piece is a personal story that shares a particular learning point, but does so without editorializing or requiring references.  How can your writing avoid judgment even as you elucidate and emphasize what you hope the reader will learn with you in your story?
  • Focus on the writing–In narratives, the “methods” of your writing enrich your themes and help them resonate for your readers.  The term “methods” refers to the craft of the writing—how are you using language to move your meaning along?  While avoiding redundancies or complicated phrasing is important, your writing may “sing” more to your readers with careful use of specific literary devices such as metaphor, alliteration, rhythm, or repetition of key words.  No matter whether you are choosing prose or poetry, remember the adage “show, don’t tell” –how can you describe people or events in ways that invoke the reader’s sensory or emotional response rather than simply stating what happened?
  • Every word matters–Especially for formats with strict word counts such as 6 word stories or 55 word essays, every word needs to move your story along. 
  • Circle back to the meaning—When looking at every word,do not lose sight of the totality of the essay.  Does this piece make sense overall?  Does it still say what you want it to say?
  • Do your homework–If your themes seem like they are common in narrative work (e.g. a physician’s experience of their own illness), you may want to look for similar pieces and think about how your story offers new angles or reflections compared to other similar work.  What can you contribute that may be new or surprising for readers?
  • Ask a friend or colleague to read your story–Consider asking someone to read your work before submitting it, to help assess both the content/themes and your storytelling style.  Do these readers resonate with your language?  Your themes?
  • You may need permission__If you describe a patient or learner scenario with enough detail, you may need to get their permission to submit your story for possible publication.
  • Don’t lose yourself–Be authentic; challenge yourself to dig deeply into both personal and professional lessons from your story.   How can you help the reader to consider multiple perspectives?

Reference: Walling A, Shapiro J, Ast T. What Makes a Good Reflective Paper? Fam Med 2012;45(1):7-12.

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Behind the Curtain: What Really Happens After You Submit a Paper to a Journal

Posted on May 3, 2025 by | 2 comments
By Sarina Schrager, MD, MS, 
Family Medicine editor-in-chief

Many people express confusion about the process of submitting a paper to a journal, receiving peer reviews, and ultimately getting published. This post attempts to answer your questions. Editors do not want their activity to be opaque. We want everyone to know what really happens when you submit a paper. The team at Family Medicine may do things a little differently than other journals, but the major steps will be the same.

You hit “submit”, then what? Once you submit your paper into the electronic portal (we use ScholarOne) the paper will be evaluated by our editorial assistant. S/he will determine if your paper conforms to our author instructions (please read before submitting) for formatting and whether you have IRB approval, if needed. The assistant will unsubmit your paper if it is too long, has too many references, or if the references are not in the proper format.

First review by the editor in chief: At Family Medicine, I read each submitted paper carefully before assigning it to an associate editor. I will occasionally reject a paper at this stage if it is not in scope for our journal (ie, we do not publish clinical papers) or if I think it is in the wrong category. For example, papers describing educational studies in one residency or one medical school fit in our Brief Report category, but probably not in Original Research. I will send those papers back to the authors if they are submitted in the Original Research category and ask the author(s) to shorten them. Another common mistake I often see is papers submitted as a narrative essay when they are really a commentary or an editorial. Narratives are personal stories about an experience you have with patient care, teaching, or your career.

Assigning papers to the associate editors: We have a team of fabulous associate editors at
Family Medicine. Papers that are both in scope and of interest our readers go on to the next step. I assign these papers to one of our associate editors who carefully reads the paper again, and either advises me they don’t think the paper is appropriate for our journal, or, more commonly, sends the paper for peer review.

Requesting peer reviewers: We have hundreds of peer reviewers who volunteer their time and expertise to help us publish the best papers we can. The associate editors aim to get 2-3 reviewers to evaluate each paper before sending it back to me with a recommendation. The associate editor sends requests to 4-6 people. Sometimes these invited reviewers don’t respond, and sometimes they respond but decline the invitation. It will occasionally require upwards of 10 invitations to find the 2-3 reviewers needed for a thorough review of each paper. We give all peer reviewers 3 weeks to return the review. Sometimes a
paper will be caught in this step for a few months. Family Medicine designates 4 potential
outcomes for a paper after peer review: accept (it’s very unusual to accept after initial peer review),
minor revision, major revision, and reject.

Revisions: The vast majority of authors will be asked to revise their paper. This is a good thing.
It means that the editorial team believes that the paper will be an important addition to the literature when revised. We expect authors to respond to every reviewer comment and explain how they addressed each comment. After the revised manuscript is submitted, I will review it again and then send back to the associate editor. In some cases, if there were many revisions, the associate editor will send the revision back to the reviewers to assure that all comments were addressed. After those reviews come back, the associate editor indicates an outcome. It is not unusual for a paper to be revised a second (and occasionally a third) time. It is important for authors to remember at this point that these further reviews are designed to improve your paper.

Recommendations for publication: Even great papers can be improved, and this is always the goal of peer review. Our peer reviewers and our associate editors provide feedback to authors to help make
their papers better. A minor revision decision signifies that a paper needs only small changes before it is appropriate to publish. A major revision decision signifies that the peer reviewers and the associate editor like the paper and think it has potential to be a meaningful addition to the scholarly literature, but has some weaknesses. We do not ask people to revise a paper if we do not think it will be interesting to our readers and contribute to the literature. Those papers are denied further review.

Acceptance: Once the associate editor believes that the authors have addressed all revision
requests, they send it to me with a recommendation for publication: Yay! Our production
team has worked hard to decrease the time from acceptance to online publication. You may expect your paper to be published online about 6 weeks after you get your acceptance notice. It will be available on the journal’s ‘Recently Published’ page before being assigned to a monthly issue. As you can see, there are a lot of steps in the process! However, they all aim to support authors through optimizing their paper’s impact.

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Optimize the Chances of Getting Your Research Published

Posted on January 30, 2025 by | Leave a comment

by Jen Lochner, MD; Valerie Gilchrist, MD; Sarina Schrager, MD, MS

Research is purposeful curiosity. Every day, we encounter questions about our work, but turning those questions into formal investigations can feel like a leap. A quality improvement (QI) project often begins with questions like, “Why is it this way? Can we do it differently?” Family Medicine publishes research and QI projects focused on medical education and faculty development. This blog post will guide you from asking a question to creating a successful, publishable product. By following these steps, you’re more likely to answer your question and share your findings.

  1. Developing a research question: The first step in any scholarly project is to come up with an effective research question. Albert Einstein stated, “Imagination is the highest form of research.” Being creative to develop a question may be the most important part of the whole process. One mnemonic to make sure that your question is the best it can be is FINER:
    • F—Feasible. Can this question be answered? Do you need millions of $ to do the project? Or can it be done with a reasonable budget?
    • I—Interesting. Do others care about your question?
    • N—Novel. Has this been done before?
    • E—Ethical. Will your project impact subjects in a way that is detrimental?
    • R—Relevant. Does the research question and subsequent research matter to family medicine or primary care.
  2. Do Your Homework:
    Start by thoroughly understanding your question. Why are you interested in it? How will it impact learners, colleagues, or patients? What assumptions are you making? Write them down. Ask yourself “Why?” at least three times to dig deeper. Then, check if others have explored the same question. Consult peers and conduct a literature review. If the question remains unanswered or insufficiently addressed, ask a medical librarian to refine your search. Many online resources, including STFM, can help you develop hypotheses for educational projects. https://www.stfm.org/media/1824/research-minute-25-writing-hypotheses_1.pdf.
    Once you have a strong research question and a hypothesis that addresses what you think is the answer to your question, you are ready to go to the next step.
  3. Build a Team:
    What if you’re unsure about the baseline data to collect? Or lack expertise in analyzing data from your EHR? Or haven’t had formal training in education but are interested in improving a curriculum? You don’t need to become a statistician or earn a degree in education to contribute to research—though you certainly can. Most organizations have experts you can partner with. The STFM Collaboratives are a great resource for finding collaborators. A team strengthens your project by bringing in new perspectives. “You don’t know what you don’t know!” Collaborating not only enhances your work, but it’s also more enjoyable and can increase the impact of your results.
  4. Plan to Publish From the Start:
    From the outset, approach your project with the goal of sharing your findings. Your investigation should be designed to answer the question in a way that’s at least presentable, and ideally, publishable. As journal editors, we look for the following when evaluating papers:’
    • Is the topic important? Will it contribute to the literature and help learners, teachers, or practitioners?
    • Is the research well done? Do the conclusions seem credible?
    • Is the paper well written? Is it easy to understand? (Questions from Josh Freeman)
  5. Begin With the End in Mind:
    Passion can drive us to dive into a project quickly, assuming that our idea is an improvement on the existing process. Without baseline data though, we can’t definitively say whether the changes are improvements worth spreading. By pausing at the beginning of your project to envision the end result, you’ll recognize the importance of defining important outcomes and collecting baseline data. Simple steps taken early on will allow you to rigorously assess the impact of your work and increase the likelihood of publication.

    We want you to be successful in your research and we want to be able to publish your paper
    so that you can share your work with colleagues.

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