Information For Librarians

Guide for our Reviewer/Editors

Scope of our Rutgers Medical Journal of QA/QI

Our goal is to make the important Rutgers local/regional QI work by our students, residents, and faculty available to our Rutgers healthcare community.  Through a process of open collaboration, we aim to help our authors develop their scientific writing and study design skills to achieve high-quality publication ready manuscripts.  We will only consider QA/QI manuscripts.  Manuscripts dealing with hypothesis testing or generation will not be considered.  Only variables which directly relate to the guidelines in question may be collected.  Every manuscript must have a qi component—either an actual qi carried out or simply a well-designed and referenced qi plan to deal with any deficiencies.  A follow-up QA assessing the efficacy of a qi is, of course, preferred but not required.

Our Rutgers Medical Journal of QA/QI has many unique features including the review process.  Our reviewers are also editors and make the primary editorial decision.  Further, our reviews are open—that is the reviewer/editor interacts with the authors to improve the manuscript if needed.  Also the reviewer/editor is acknowledged on the title page since the quality of these manuscripts are often increased through this interaction.  The following are the benchmarks our reviewer/editors utilize in our decision to publish manuscripts:

1. We only accept manuscripts based upon retrospective chart review QA/QI studies or retrospective QI data base studies carried out at Rutgers healthcare:  Is this study a retrospective, QI data base or chart review QA and/ or QI study?  If yes continue the review, if not then refer the manuscript to the Journal Editor-in-Chief (skeller@rutgers.edu). Your choices as a reviewer/editor are:

1. Accept as is or work with the authors to make necessary changes.  When satisfied then the email a production ready manuscript to the Journal Editor (skeller@rutgers.edu)
2. Reject for not being a retrospective QI data base or chart review study and email your decision to the Journal Editor (skeller@rutgers.edu) 

2. Key Components of the Manuscript: 

            Title Page:

            List each author, their degrees and affiliations, indicate the corresponding author, number of pages, and date originally submitted to the Journal. The section of the Journal should be indicated based upon the lead author’s level of training; faculty, resident or student.  An acknowledgement of the Reviewer/Editor should follow the authors.  Provide a few key words which will be used in indexing of your article. 

            Abstract:

            Each manuscript should include a brief abstract that captures the essence of the paper succinctly condenses each section of the manuscript.  Abstracts should be no longer than half a page.

            Body of the Manuscript:

                        Introduction: Setting the stage for the study.

The introduction should address the significance of the subject matter of the QA/QI—why is it important to conduct this QA/QI.  A very brief review of any previous QA/QI studies on this same subject or very closely related subjects should be included and cited.   One of the key considerations when evaluating a manuscript for its worth is the importance of the subject that one is assessing guideline adherence.  Medical conditions and/or screenings of sufficient gravity will be viewed with favor.  This, of course, is a reviewer/editor’s judgement call.

                        Methods: What the authors did to conduct this QA/QI?  Methods need to be written to allow the reader to know what was done and be sufficiently detailed to allow others to replicate the study.

• Each methods section must have as its first sentence a statement of non-human subject research.  This can be either through an IRB determination of non-human subject research with the protocol number and/or the Rutgers self-certification for non-human subject study.
• The guidelines and benchmarks used for this study should be detailed and referenced. It is important to only collect data that directly addresses the guidelines. While it may be of interest to collect other data to answer related questions, a QA/QI must not collect those data under a non-human subject determination.  Doing so would make the study a hypothesis testing or hypothesis generating study and your manuscript will therefore not be considered for publication in our Journal.  The editors encourage future, follow-up studies that do consider non-guideline data however this requires an entirely different IRB process and those studies belong in other journals.
• What was the random selection schema utilized to assure an un-biased sample? The validity of a retrospective chart QA/QI investigation rests upon the strength of the random selection of charts to review. Thus, medical records/charts of patients with the conditions/disease to be assessed must be randomly selected from the population of such patients’ charts to assure an un-biased sample.  Study samples must be randomly drawn accross a year and randomly drawn regardless of day of the week or time of day.
• What were the criteria used to determine the number (n) of charts or subjects to be collected? We suggest using 50 charts as a general rule.  Using the Confidence Interval (CI) statistic state approximately how wide a confidence interval was chosen as sufficient, and the n associated with this CI.  Vassarstats is a very user-friendly internet CI calculator--Vassarstats--> proportions --> Confidence Interval of a proportion.  The editors will provide mentoring on n determination and CI calculations as needed.

      Results: What were the findings of your study?

Using paragraph form and or tables or charts explain what was found by this study.  For each finding there must be a method described above to detail how the result was determined.

      Discussion: Putting the findings into broader context.

This section is where the authors explain, discuss, and put into context each finding listed in the previous section (Results).  If a QI is being considered here is where the authors should discuss what they are proposing to remediate any deficits found in the QA.  A limitation of the study section belongs towards the end of the Discussion and finally a very brief and succinct Conclusion subsection at the end of the Discussion should be written.

                        References: Cited literature.

See the following YouTube video to help you correctly format for references: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuEb1RC1auw

3. Copy Editing:

  The goal is to have a professional look to our online publication so keeping to these few formatting rules is important.  All manuscripts must be typed in Word with standard margins, 12 pitch, and single spaced using Calibri font.  Manuscripts are encouraged to be no longer than 5 pages, unless justification is provided.  This page limit is exclusive of tables, graphs and references. Please use standard Journal format.   The 5-page limit is flexible—if the subject matter requires more pages then so be it but the authors should discuss the additional length with the reviewer/editor who will make the final determination. All final revised manuscripts must be publication ready and follow the formatting found in our published articles.  We do not have the editorial staff to perform copy-editing—this must be done by the reviewer/editor and authors by simply following the above directions and consulting published aticles.  Email the production ready manuscript to the Editor (skeller@rutgers.edu) for final review and publication.

It is the Journals’ philosophy to encourage and work together with each author to achieve a high-quality manuscript for publication.  This process may require several rounds of revision and review, but we believe that if the authors work cooperatively with positive and sympathetic reviewer/editors this can be achieved with almost all manuscripts.

• Be positive and helpful whenever possible
• Point out the good points of the manuscript
• If you identify weaknesses do so with thoughtfulness
• Once you have clearly and gently pointed out the flaws it is incumbent on you, the reviewer/editor, to suggest remedies to each significant flaw.
• Be as positive note as possible— “With these few (or minor) edits this manuscript would be recommended for publication” or “Although there are deficiencies in the manuscript as written…. with x and y it will make a valuable contribution to the QA/QI literature”