Publishing Operational Challenges Posted on October 19, 2007 Martica Hall (bio) recommends writing recruitment and reliability papers, as well as findings.

There should be nothing that you do that you can’t publish, so, for example, even recruitment strategies or in our dementia caregiver study, we came up with this control intervention, which, at the time, it was counseled to me that; you know, maybe it would be better to do a usual care control, so just let the people just sort of travel alongside the people you’re treating. And for various reasons, I said no; I want to do an intervention that’s a control intervention, and now, some of the very people who said, “You know, you might not want to do that;” they have come and asked for copies of this control intervention because it’s getting a lot of attention, and so I went to my team last week and said, “You know, we should write a paper on this and just put out a paper, saying; we have written this intervention; it controls for contact, social support, all these other things,” and get a paper out there on that, and I would never, that’s not my kind of thing. I don’t think about those kinds of papers, but papers like that or papers like a reliability paper; say you’ve come up with some problem in your lab, and you’re really not sure. Well, I guarantee you, you’re not the only person that is gonna have this problem, so you write a paper about it. You get out there. It’s not gonna be in JAMA, but it’s still a paper, and it actually will probably be cited and used more than a lot of the other papers that you’ll ever write.

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