By Anna Samson, Chantale Thurston, Don Wood, Trinity Lowthian,
Dawn Richards and Perri Tutelman
Providing input on a research team’s draft manuscript: Why this is important and some guidance
Academic publishing is one important way for research teams to share their research results. If you’re on a research team as a patient partner providing your lived experience, you might be asked to review a manuscript before it’s submitted to a journal to be considered for publication.
There are lots of reasons why your perspectives about a manuscript are important – here are a few:
- Getting feedback from all members of the research team who contributed to the work before a manuscript is published and made available is an important part of the research process.
- Providing feedback is an opportunity to make sure that the research is presented in a way that is: patient-oriented, clear and easy to understand, and reflects the messages that are most important to patients. This helps to increase the chances that the work will actually help to advance future research and improve clinical practice down the road.
- Feedback based on your lived experience is just as important as feedback based on scientific or medical expertise.
We’re a team that includes people with lived experience or patient partners, a researcher, and a person who facilitates patient engagement on research teams and initiatives. We’ve been part of research teams when a manuscript is circulated to the whole team without much more information than “please review and provide feedback.”
We know that providing those with lived experience on the team with some guidance about reviewing a manuscript is helpful. We turned our thoughts on this into a checklist. You can download the checklist and use it in your own work or pass it on to others who might benefit from this information.
Things to consider while reviewing:
- No comment is too small.
- Comments don't always need to be about something that needs to be changed. If you felt something was well written, let them know!
- Some things you might want to think about as you are reviewing:
- Is the writing clear and easy to understand? Is there excessive jargon that gets in the way of clarity?
- Does what you read fit your lived experience? Why or why not?
- Are the word choices sensitive and appropriate?
- Does the writing make you think about any connections to your experiences or other work?
- Did you learn something new from what you read? Feel free to share it!
- Does the research make you think about possible ideas for future research to suggest?
Other important points:
- Consider how you would like to provide feedback - e.g., in writing, on a call or in a meeting, or some other way that works best for you.
- Critical feedback is just as or even more important than positive feedback. Don’t worry about hurting feelings when suggesting things that could be changed. Researchers are trained to incorporate others' perspectives and to take comments to strengthen their work.
- The team might not implement all the comments/changes. Consider asking why feedback is included or not. Keep in mind that sometimes there are sections that are required and cannot be changed substantially. Also, sometimes there are strict word count limits that the team is working with.
- Questions you might want to ask the team:
- What sections of the manuscript are the greatest focus?
- What journal will this be submitted to? Sometimes the format and framing of the research will vary depending on the journal and the field.
If you’re interested in learning more generally about the publishing process when teams include patient/lived and living experiences perspectives on them, you can find more here:
- A paper about the publishing process and how patient partners can meet the requirements for authorship
- A video about how patient partners can be included on teams publishing a paper.
Don’t be afraid to ask your research team colleagues questions about any steps in the processes that they engage you in, and good luck in your work together!
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