Author

Author anging on the office wall of one of my academic colleagues is a framed reprint of the front page of an article from the New England Journal of Medicine in which he was the lead author. This is his way of expressing satisfaction and pride (it is in a corner of the room little trafficked by visitors, so it is not as showy as it sounds). Getting a piece of work published in a high-quality journal is no easy accomplishment. The better journals are appropriately critical and even a little suspicious (remember recent exposures of fraudulent observations and of multiauthored articles in which some of the authors did not understand the contents of the paper). Moreover, editors have limited space in which to publish, and they require brevity as well as clarity. The illustrations must be pertinent, and we may not repeat in the text what we crowded into figure legends and tables. Most of all, the editor and the author want to publish something original, an appropriately tested hypothesis that allows one to draw usable conclusions, a new way of looking at an old problem, a theory that brings together previously unseen relationships to make a unified concept. It would be wonderful if we could get at least a small dose of style along with the science, but few authors are inspired enough to even try, and many editors denude one's occasionally gorgeous prose, allegedly in the interest of brevity and purity. One of my proudest accomplishments is the first published article ever to bear my name. Burke Evans, my o~hopedic colleague, was the senior author of the a~cle (on osteogenic sarcoma); it contained the following splendid legend underneath a microscope section: "Mere spicules of sclerotic bone remain in this bed of bizarre cellularity where strands of osteoid are yet uncalcified." Scratch any young academic faculty person and what will come oozing out of the w o u n d is antipathy toward, if not downright fear of, scientific writing. In my experience, of all the things that tend to discourage young people from an academic career, publication seems paramount. Perhaps having read the dreary medical literature for years, the neophyte author is reluctant to add to the noise; more likely, the young academician is afraid that he or she will not be up to the task, having had little or no experience, almost no encouragement or guidance, and no sense of the rewards that publication brings.

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Preoccupation with publication to the exclusion or serious limitation of other important academic endeavors is guaranteed to produce a slipshod clinician and ineffective teacher. On the other hand, failure to properly recognize the seminal place of publication in the career agenda of budding academicians is foolish. Just the right balance is probably impossible to again, but it is much too easy for radiologists to glorify clinical practice and teaching skills to the neglect of contributing something new to one's knowledge of the world. New knowledge comes in many forlns, and one of the things that young academicians find daunting about research is the inaccurate preconception that the only serious research is laboratory research, that the only serious subjects are animals. It is easy to see h o w a young physician interested in an academic career might be put off by the presumed necessity of submerging his or her real interests in favor of basic bench research. Clinical research, or research on teaching methods, effectiveness, and so on, has gotten a poorer-than-deserved reputation as a consequence of the publication of innumerable examples of shoddy work. Poorly planned efforts, inaccurate data collection, inattention to the requirements of adequate statistical analysis, and anecdotal recitations instead of scientific rigor have given some research a bad name. Serious and widespread educational efforts to teach the fundamentals of research reasoning, methodology, statistics, and so on, would help eliminate some of the pseudoscientific debris that still fills many of our journals. Teaching students h o w to conduct research is at least as important as teaching them h o w to apply for grant money. There is nothing quite like having one's name up front as the author of a first-rate piece of work published in a well-refereed and distinguished journal. And it is contagious: Having done it once, most of us catch the fever and want to repeat the performance. Because the academic futures of young faeulty people depend On their ability to conceive, carry out, and report investigations, every experienced one of us should help initiate our younger colleagues into the mysteries and satisfactions of authorship. Melvyn H. Schreiber, MD University of Texas Medical Branch Galveston, TX 549