Dealing with manuscript rejections in academic medicine: It takes two hands to clap

Abstract

Academic publishing is increasingly prevalent in clinical training and practice, as part of the burgeoning field of academic medicine, where physicians are expected not only to perform their conventional clinical duties and responsibilities, but also increasingly have to engage in various forms of scholarly activities to contribute to evidence-based practice, as part of their key performance indicators. However, for physicians who are not trained as academics or scientists, the learning curve for scholarly endeavours can be steep and fraught with setbacks and rejections. Therefore, in this editorial article, we offer our perspectives as residents-in-training on the roles of both clinician-authors and journal editorial/peer review teams in facilitating healthy cognitive-emotional processing of unfavourable manuscript decisions in academic medicine.