Key messages are essential tools in communicating your topic

Abstract

EditorialKey messages are essential tools in communicating your topicAs befits a journal devoted to health information, the Health Information and Libraries Journal (HILJ) is committed to ongoing quality improvement. To this end the editorial advisory board has been reviewing the metadata attached to articles. We started by updating our list of keywords 1 and at this years Editorial Advisory Board meeting we examined key messages attached to articles.Keywords: Communication, research, information retrieval, relevance, translation of research findings Key messages are a relatively recent innovation, not just for HILJ but many other health science related journals, read in conjunction with the abstract to signpost the significance of a manuscript for policy and practice. Since 2004 HILJ authors of original articles and, since their introduction in 2007, review article, have been asked to submit key messages relating to implications for practice and implications for policy. Despite their relative longevity, the editorial advisory board decided to review key messages when it became apparent that author ⁄ s are often uncertain how to write meaningful key messages. Our _decision to improve the quality of key messages was very timely, coinciding with the publication of two recent articles reviewing the quality of key messages and the instructions provided to authors.Anne Lynn, Allessia Owens and Jean Bartunek have recently explored how three journals (New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and Annals of Internal Medicine) frame their implications for medical practice. 2 They found that just 25% of the articles they reviewed recommended a specific course of action. Only one article gave instruction on how to implement the changes, half used tentative language and two-thirds called for further research. By comparison management research articles nearly always specified who should use the information and drew from over 60 types of potential users, whereas only 23% of the clinical articles specified the people whose actions should reflect the reported findings. They concluded that authors and editors of the clinical literature could be more clear and direct in presenting implications of research findings for practice, including stating when the findings do not justify changes in practice.Sheila Fleischhacker and her colleagues examined the instructions to authors regarding policyrelated research and implications of fifty leading childhood obesity journals. 3 For each journal they extracted information on: aims and scope; instructions to authors; types of articles published; articles' formats and abstract structure. Only three journals (6%) explicitly indicated a potential policy outlet within their research article format and one journal provided a potential policy outlet within their abstract structure. They concluded that 'Opportunity exists for the development of more explicit editorial policies and best practices on how researchers incorporate policy components in their study design and articulate policy implications i...