Duty to Publish

As I read through the list of Canadian Society of Hospital Pharmacists award winners recently, I was impressed by the range of projects targeting appropriate medication use! I thought, “I hope they are published”. It occurred to me shortly thereafter that I was accepting the possibility that someone who had spent a couple years on a project would complete it and receive an award, yet not disseminate the results as expected, through publication. While this may seem strange, I’m sure we can all relate and might even assume it normal to not always end up publishing our research. Raise your hand if you have had a research study or project that has been stuck at the abstract stage for far longer than it deserves. If you raised your hand, you, like me, are a typical mortal who does not always have writing superpowers and has simply hit the stage of manuscript inertia