Writing about all of this
Nine guides to the genres of psychotherapy writing, and the working documents that go with them — from appraising a single trial to a pre-registered review protocol, and the consent you need before you write about a real person.
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What kind of thing are you writing, and what does that kind of thing have to do?
The genres, and what each one is actually for
Nine kinds of writing a psychotherapy student or clinician produces, and the mistake characteristic of each.
Searching the literature so that it can be checked
A search you cannot describe is a search nobody can evaluate, including you in six months.
APA 7 essentials, and the parts people get wrong
The style rules that carry meaning, as distinct from the ones that are merely conventions.
Reporting a study
The checklists journals require, and the sentences that reviewers should stop but often do not.
Reporting guidelines: which one, and why they exist
Checklists that make a study reportable, reproducible, and reviewable. Most journals now require one.
Writing about numbers without overclaiming
The sentences that get past reviewers and should not.
Qualitative work: quality criteria that are not borrowed from trials
Reliability and validity are the wrong words. Here are the right ones.
Integrity and consequence
How honest people produce unreliable literatures, and what you owe the person you are writing about.
Integrity: the practices that produced the replication crisis
None of these felt like misconduct to the people doing them. That is the point.
Writing about people you have treated
The ethics here are stricter than most trainees are taught, and disguise alone is not sufficient.
Submission, peer review, and predatory journals
How the process actually works, and how to avoid the parts of it that are a scam.
Working documents
Every one of these is a full form: fill it in, get teaching notes as you go, and export the result as text.
- Brief case reportApply one theoretical perspective to a case and produce a defensible brief treatment plan.17 fields · As a written assignment, and as the discipline behind every real treatment plan.→
- Critical appraisal of a research articleLoad-bearingDecide whether a specific study supports its own conclusion — and be able to say why in a seminar.27 fields · Journal clubs, article discussion assignments, and before citing anything you have only read the abstract of.→
- Self-survey of attitudes and valuesEstablish, in writing and before you know much, what you already believe about how people change.21 fields · At the start of a survey course. Kept, and re-read at the end.→
- Literature review planTurn a topic into an argument, and a search into something you can describe.19 fields · Before reading widely. Revised as the argument takes shape.→
- Empirical paper outline (APA / JARS)Get the architecture right before writing, so the paper argues rather than reports.28 fields · After the analysis, before the first draft.→
- Systematic review protocol (PRISMA-P)Load-bearingPre-specify the review, so that the method is a method rather than a description of what you ended up doing.19 fields · Before the search. Registered on PROSPERO before screening begins.→
- Research proposal & ethics applicationLoad-bearingMake the case that the question matters, the method can answer it, and the risks are managed.22 fields · Dissertation proposals, funding applications, and IRB / research ethics committee submissions.→
- Consent to publish clinical materialConsent requiredRecord a specific, informed, revocable consent before writing about a real person — and think properly about whether to.13 fields · Before drafting any case report, conference presentation, book chapter or teaching material based on an identifiable patient.→
One thing to hold on to
Every rule in this section resolves to a single obligation: write so that a reader can tell how much to believe you. Report the comparator, because it determines the effect size. Report the search, because a search nobody can reproduce is an opinion. Label exploratory analyses as exploratory, because a prediction made after seeing the data is not a prediction. Report harms, because a treatment that helps most people can damage some of them. And do not write about a patient who has not read what you wrote.
None of this makes a paper less publishable. It makes it worth citing.