JAMA Says: Talk to Your Medical Librarian

Want to get published in JAMA? One way to improve your chances is to talk to your medical librarian.

In a viewpoint piece published on September 10, 2014, potential and future JAMA authors are encouraged to improve their review articles by summarizing the literature in a more systematic way. Written by a medical librarian, a physician, and the Deputy Editor, Clinical Reviews and Education for JAMA, the article lays out the process for doing so and exhorts authors to collaborate with a medical librarian. Extensive literature searches are difficult, and a medical librarian can provide expertise to facilitate the process, save time, and reduce bias in the resulting article.

According to the article, here are ways a medical librarian can help:

  • Help refine the question and determine its feasibility by conducting preliminary searches
  • Identify relevant sources, including databases and grey literature sources beyond PubMed
  • Craft search strategies using platform- and source-specific features, such as controlled vocabulary terms, limits, etc.
  • Streamline the organization of results by using bibliographic management tools such as EndNote
  • Authoring the methods section describing the search

If you are authoring a review for JAMA or any other publication, please contact one of us today at medical-librarian@duke.edu or 919.660.1100 to get started!