Forensics Fellowships and Publishing

[MrKimura]

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Hello,

I am interested in knowing if anyone who is currently in a Forensics Fellowship (or considering one) would have advice about some possible journals that would accept resident contributions from someone who is not already in that field. I am hoping to find a way to get something published (or submit something) between now and my applications. I am interested in a lot of things but feel sort of scatterbrained at what topics or format I should try to target. If anyone has any ideas or the names of a few journals they would recommend, I would appreciate it.

Thanks!
MK

PS-Sorry if the answer to this has been posted already; I was not able to find it (although I admit, I sort of suck at searching things correctly here).

 

[whopper]

Many journals will want a resident to work with an attending on a publication. It's funny because I had a publication that didn't hit the stands until I became an attending. I asked an attending to be my "sponsor." He reluctantly agreed because he didn't really do any work on the project other than to read my report. By the time it hit the stands I was an attending so I asked them to take his name off, which was fine by the former attending because he felt like a poseur.

Any psychiatric journal will consider a forensic psychiatry article for publication if it's good enough. The Journal of AAPL is...well the name says what it is! For better or worse, most of the articles in that journal are op-eds, letters to the editor, and there aren't many articles based on case control studies, double-blinded placebo controlled studies, etc.

There's also the journal known as Law and Human Behavior. Now this is a real intense journal. Pretty much all articles are studies, and they are very intensely done. There's some very intense statistics such as factor analysis, Tukey's HSD (Honest Significant Difference) among other methods in their articles.

L&HB is geared more for psychologists because they get the intense statistical training we medical doctors usually do not. It's actually quite strange because so much of what we do in forensic psychiatry relies on statistical models, yet few programs offer training in it.


As for ideas, I don't think it's worth it to recommend any. Why? If you want to write up an article, you need the inspiration to carry it through. Simply giving an idea is not going to also give you the inspiration. The best advice I can give you on coming up with an idea on your own is think of anything you are doing as a resident that somehow interacts with the law that you believe the current state of the art of the profession can improve.
You could also start reading the journals, and get an idea from there.

I can think of plenty, but what inspires me may not inspire you.

You should ask your program which of the attendings in it have the most forensic experience and ask them to work with you. Most programs don't have a forensic attending, and if they do have one.