 In this module we're going to talk about planning the manuscript and one of the most important things to keep in mind is it takes a lot of time in the planning stages and that's a mistake authors often make is not allowing enough time during the planning stages. So the first step is to select a topic. You might wonder well what could I write about and let me give you a few tips based on my experience as an editor. First of all journals would love to have information about new techniques, new drugs, new clinical procedures and those topics would be excellent for a clinical journal. Also clinical journals are very interested in getting case studies but those case studies should be not so rare that the reader will never experience a patient with that disorder. Instead the case study should be focused on something that the average reader of that journal will encounter in their practice. So for example you could do a case study where you're helping the reader to understand the pathophysiology of the disorder, you're helping the reader to know about assessment techniques, interventions, if it's for a nurse practitioner audience you might focus on differential diagnosis and prescribing of drugs. So a case study would be a wonderful possible topic if you have an interesting one to share. The case doesn't all aspects do not have to be real. You can make up part of the case and as a matter of fact it would be better to protect the anonymity of the patient if you change some of the actual facts about the case. Journals very much want articles that focus on original research. Those are harder to get sometimes but a research report where you're telling the reader about your data and your findings those are often sought out by editors. Literature reviews are another good topic for a journal but the literature review must be a synthesis of what is known not just a litany of study after study or article after article but instead you as the author synthesize the literature. You tell the reader what is known about a topic, what is not known about a topic and how you might want to fill the gap in that topic. Another idea is developing an evidence-based protocol. Those topics are highly sought by journal editors because you as the author have done all the work to analyze the literature and the evidence and you're pulling it together for the reader. So a protocol that's based on evidence would be a very important topic that you might want to consider in a journal article. An opinion, a commentary or a debate is a topic that we rarely find in nursing journals but I think would be excellent if we could have more in our literature. It would be good if we could take a topic and one author take one viewpoint and a different author take the opposing viewpoint but these kind of debates and commentaries it seems not to be the norm in our discipline but I think there's certainly room for us to debate many a topic and I as an editor would welcome those kind of papers in a journal. Solution-focused or how-to articles are another great topic for your paper. Readers very much want to learn from you. How did you solve a problem? How did you make a practice change? How did you for example integrate new inexperienced nurses into your unit? How did you solve a problem? What steps did you take? So how-to solutions focus articles are very popular and often not as easy to write as you think because once you've lived through it you might forget the actual steps you took to solve that problem. So take time, go back, think about each of the steps. Who are the stakeholders? Who did you have to convince to be part of your work and how did you do it? How did you come to a solution? Professional development topics are another good idea. For example I have written on how to interview for a job, how to write a professional resume. So some topics like that might be helpful as well to your readers and there's lots that you could think about in professional development areas that would be good for journals. Another possibility if you're struggling still to come up with a topic what I do as an editor is I follow social media discussions. What are topics people are talking about through social media? What are questions people have about practice? And so those topics might give you a hint for a possible idea for your journal article. Current fads might be another topic that you want to think about. Current issues but be careful you can't take so long to write the article that by the time it gets published that fad or that issue or that trend is now old. So think carefully about something that's a current fad. Be sure to work quickly to get your paper into the journal. Challenging experiences can be another good topic. For example how did you deal with a difficult family? How did you solve that? What were the steps you took when you had a very problematic family and you were caring for a patient? Other kinds of challenging experiences are good for readers to know about because they learn from you as the author as to how did you handle it? What tips can you offer to make things better? Another good idea for a topic is suppose recently you gave a presentation or a talk. I'd encourage you to turn that presentation into a paper and a great technique is to actually record yourself giving that presentation or giving that talk and then paying someone to actually transcribe the tape, the recording, and there's the first draft of your paper. It's really a very good technique that I've used myself and it makes the next draft so much easier because you have a whole paper already written there for you. Another idea for a topic is to challenge sacred cows. In our profession, why do we do the things we do? Why have we held on to that the shift for nursing starts at 7 a.m.? When you think about that many nurses are women, many have child care issues, what babysitter wants your child at 5 a.m. so that you can then get off to work and be on time for your 7 o'clock shift? Wouldn't it be great to write an article challenging why do we start our shifts at 7 a.m.? Has anyone ever tried to start a shift at 9 a.m. and work differently? So we have a lot of sacred cows. Some of our sacred cows have been nursing care plans, nursing diagnoses, so you might want to write a paper where you challenge these sacred cows and offer a different alternative. Now when selecting a topic there's certain criteria that you need to think about for your topic. The first is the topic should answer what we call the so what question. So what do you have to offer a reader? What do you have to say that's new or different that your reader won't already know? You don't want to pick a topic that's simply a summary of what is out there and has been out there for a while. Let me give you an example. In nursing education we've been using simulation now for quite a few years. So if you wrote a paper saying gee I think it would be great if we incorporated simulation into a course. That wouldn't be an acceptable topic in today's world because that's already done. It's already known. Instead if you wanted to write about simulation maybe a study where you compared different types of simulations or simulation with different types of learners. But simply a paper telling a simulation is a great idea to use in education wouldn't be a good topic in today's world. As I mentioned your topic needs to offer a new slant. Something new, something different, a different twist, a different aspect to that topic. So step back again and ask yourself as you're picking a topic what do I have new to offer? For example if you're writing about care of the heart failure patient you might say well what could be new? What could be new is a home monitoring program that you've established in your community to help patients follow their weight follow their diet through a telehealth or a home monitoring program. And how did you start that program? How did you get it funded? So think about a new slant something different that you can offer to the reader. A common mistake particularly in nursing education journals is to claim that your topic or your paper is a research study when in reality your paper is simply the course evaluation data. So don't fall into that trap. If you're going to offer a course or you revised one of your courses and now you're collecting data from the students at the end of the semester and maybe you're even interviewing the employer that would be called course evaluation. Other readers may not be necessarily interested in your course and what the evaluation data showed. So don't make the mistake of thinking that your course evaluation questionnaires whether they be quantitative surveys or qualitative interviews that's very rich important data to guide your curriculum to help meet your accreditation standards but the evaluation of your single course at your single college is not necessarily of interest to other readers but that is a common mistake made by faculty are submitting papers that are really course evaluations. Be sure that your topic is of interest to the readers of your targeted journal. That's another common mistake in picking a topic is that it's really not appropriate for the readers of that journal. The topic must be at the appropriate level so if your journal is targeted to advanced practice nurses then you wouldn't want to write a very very basic article. Be sure your topic has a match for the intended audience.