In four separate posts, Austin Frakt and Aaron Carroll from The Incidental Economist will describe their translation and dissemination process, specifically how they turn academic papers into interesting blog posts. Each of their posts will cover one of these questions:
- How do we read research papers?
- How do we decide what to write about?
- How do we make our posts interesting?
- How do we decide where to publish them?
This is the second post:
How do we decide what papers/topics to write about?
Aaron: Let's start with the things I don't like to write about. I will not cover presentations at meetings. Such research is often preliminary and has not yet been fully peer-reviewed. Much research presented at meetings never gets published. We shouldn't react to it before then. I will not cover most basic science work, because I'm interested mostly in things that apply to humans at large, and that research — by definition — hasn't gotten there yet.
I am most interested in new research that will apply to large populations or common issues. I'm especially interested in research that might be useful in policy discussions. I'm also interested in analyses from think tanks that fall under this definition.
My interests change over time. Right now, I'm super fascinated by nutrition. I'm also interested in things that focus on kids. I'm interested in measures of quality, screening, and population health. That list expands all the time.
I think I'm different from Austin in that I love to write about research that I think is really newsy. If I see a new study that interest me, I want to post on it immediately. I like to do that for the same reason I don't necessarily talk to authors before I write about their work. I want to present my thoughts and my thinking, and I'd like for that to be as unfiltered as possible. Once many others have written on a subject, it's hard for me to get back behind the veil of ignorance.
I also find that people who send me stuff get their research covered by me more often than they'd think. Not all the time, but I encourage people to have a low bar to send me their work!
Austin: I write about health policy-relevant research. Though there are rare exceptions, I don't write about the latest government report or analyze proposed health care legislation.
So, what papers do I write about? This is pretty simple: Those I find interesting. My problem — and it's a good problem — is I find more papers interesting than I have time to read, let alone write about. I have to let a lot of things go, or flag them for later. Sometimes later never comes. My backlog of writing subjects just keeps growing.
There's one exception: if the paper I find interesting is also very hot, I may not bother writing about it. Everyone else will, and I let them go first. (I pass a lot of things to Aaron and, to my delight, he writes about them ... so I don't have to!) Only if I feel I have something unique and important to add will I consider weighing in. The world doesn't need another voice echoing countless others.
It's (typically) not interesting to me is to make the same arguments and points repeatedly. I always strive to write about something new. I don't always succeed. Sometimes in an area I've already written about, a new, important paper is published, and I'll consider writing about it. There are some topics I feel I own — hospital cost shifting is one example, reference pricing by CalPERS is another — and I have an almost complete history of work on them captured by my prior posts. It would pain me not to keep that going, so I do. I'll write about every hospital cost shifting or CalPERS reference pricing paper.
Most of the work of writing is not finding what to write about, but finding a way to do so that's interesting to others. I don't always care that my writing on TIE be interesting to others — it's my blog and I'll do what I want. But for AcademyHealth, JAMA Forum, Upshot, and anywhere else paying me to write, I certainly do, as do those outlets' editors!
How we make our writing interesting is the next topic of this series.
Aaron E. Carroll, MD (@aaronecarroll), is a professor of pediatrics at Indiana University School of Medicine. Austin B. Frakt, PhD (@afrakt), is a health economist with the Department of Veterans Affairs, an Associate Professor at Boston University’s School of Medicine and School of Public Health, and a Visiting Associate Professor with the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Both blog about health economics and policy at The Incidental Economist. The views expressed in this post are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Department of Veterans Affairs, Boston University, Harvard University, or Indiana University.