Manuscript Success and Choosing a Topic

By Leslie H. Nicoll, PhD, MBA, RN, FAAN

Writer’s Camp Director

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Choosing a topic is crucial, and not as easy as you might think.

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Whether you are carrying out a research study, developing a new initiative for patients, or hosting a dinner party, it’s safe to say that the planning step of the process is crucial to ultimate success. The same is true for writing for professional publication. While dozens of books have been written on the writing process, I believe that many of them shortchange the upfront planning process, which, in my experience, is the foundation upon which everything else is built. Invest time and energy at the beginning into the what (topic), the where (journal), and the how (structure) of writing your article. You will receive the payback in a writing process that minimizes stress, maximizes success, and leads to your preferred outcome: seeing your name in print.

Manuscript Success: T-J-T-M-D

I am a process person and have been so all my life. I remember learning the scientific process back in seventh or eighth grade and thinking how much sense it made. In college, the nursing process was tailor-made for me, even though I groaned sometimes when I had to write actual care plans! Thus, it is not surprising that I would come up with a process for manuscript success.

To keep it simple, I have boiled the Manuscript Success Process down to five steps, seven words, one acronym, and one mnemonic, which I suggest you memorize:

Step One: Topic

Step Two: Journal Due Diligence

Step Three: Template (Article and Analysis)

Step Four: MMO (Manuscript Math Outline)

Step Five: Draft

The acronym: T-J-T-M-D

The mnemonic:  The Journal Takes My Diligent…work seriously.

In addition to being a mnemonic, it is a positive affirmation of your work!

An Overview of the Steps

Let’s break down the steps into a bit more detail. This article will discuss Step One, Choosing a Topic. Each of he other steps will be covered in subsequent articles published here on Writer’s Camp.

T: Topic—Selecting an appropriate topic for publication. While it may seem obvious or easy, selecting a topic is the foundation of everything that follows. Without a good, appropriate topic for scholarly dissemination, your article will never be published.

J: Journal Due Diligence—A systematic way to review potential journals and then select three as potential outlets for publication. Too many people make the mistake of selecting a journal after the first draft is written. This is a recipe for disaster.

T: Template (Article and Analysis)—Selecting a published template article to help guide your own manuscript development. Analyzing an article that has already been accepted and published is a great way to think about how your article should be structured.

M: Manuscript Math Outline (MMO)—A different way to approach writing an outline and structuring your manuscript. Outlines are often like strategic plans—they get written and then ignored. The MMO is a different way to write an outline and can be very helpful to keep your paper organized and the right length for your selected journal.

D: Draft—Writing the first draft, after all the other steps are done. Finally, you get to write!

These steps are meant to be followed in order, and time must be spent on each one—time that includes thinking as well as writing and work. Now, take a minute to think about something you have written recently. Where in the process did you begin? Be honest. If you are like the vast majority of people I work with, I would guess your answer is “Draft.” Or maybe you thought “Topic,” then “Draft.” But you probably skipped Journal Due Diligence, Template Article, and MMO, and if I asked you why, you would probably say it is because you don’t know what they are! Fair enough—that is why I am writing this series of articles, to introduce you to the Manuscript Success Process and give you the knowledge and skills to be successful in your writing endeavors.

Topic: Selecting an Appropriate Subject

So, step one: choosing a topic for your article. You may think this is apparent and be tempted to skip this step, but don’t. Even if you think your topic is obvious, that is, you did a research study, so now you are going to write a research report, there are still important things to think about with respect to topic selection.  

Selecting a topic for your article is key. If you have a lousy idea, one that will never be of any interest to any audience, then it is never going to get published. It is as simple as that. The salient point is to figure out how to take your idea and turn it into something engaging and interesting that will catch the eye of an editor.

Read that last sentence again: catch the eye of an editor. Many potential authors say to me, “I want to reach hundreds of readers.” Keep in mind that as an author with a submitted article, you have a handful of readers: the editor, a couple of reviewers, and perhaps someone on the editorial board. That’s it. They are the gatekeepers. Once your article has been accepted and published in a journal, then it will be available to hundreds, maybe thousands, of readers. But at that point, your work will have long been done. When you sign off on your finished article, it goes out of your hands and the production team takes over to proof, edit, fact check, design, and ultimately transform your manuscript into a published article that is indexed, distributed, and (hopefully), read.

It may be hard to believe but editors actually don’t want to publish boring articles in their journals. Speaking as an editor, I look to have a variety of articles on topics that will be of interest to my readers. I want well-written articles that share cutting-edge knowledge or tried-and-true topics that are presented in new and innovative ways. What do I mean by tried-and-true? Pain management is a good example. That is a topic that is never out-of-date. But just writing the same old, same old will not intrigue an editor. You have to find the angle that is fresh and different.

What Editors Do and What Peer Reviewers Offer

Let me clarify the role of editor versus peer reviewers. First off, all scholarly or professional journals use some sort of review process. Editors rely on reviewers to ensure that the information in a manuscript is accurate, current, appropriate, ethically sound, rigorous, and, last but not least, interesting. Feedback from reviewers is very important in the manuscript selection process. However, what reviewers don’t have is the big picture of the journal—that’s the editor’s domain. In addition to the review comments, the editor also considers how your topic fits in with what’s been published previously and what’s in the pipeline for the future, as well as what readers have asked for. Thus, a manuscript may be positively reviewed for accuracy but still get rejected because it’s not timely, poorly written, or overdone. Your challenge, then, is to make sure your paper is both accurate and appropriate as well as interesting and new.

Important Points in Topic Selection

So, to repeat: your topic selection is crucial. The most important thing is to write about what you know. Yes, it sounds obvious, but I have received query letters that say, “What topics are of interest to your journal? Let me know and I’ll pick one to write about.” Huh?

What you know might be right under your nose. Have you done something recently that gave you an “Aha!” moment? What was it? Can you turn that into an article? In other words, think about your day-to-day work as a way to identify a topic of interest that you would like to write about. A big advantage of using your daily work as a source of topics is that you are more likely to incorporate writing into your schedule if your topic isn’t foreign or distant but rather, up close and personal. Again, many people tell me they struggle with writing and scholarship and find that too often it falls to the bottom of their “to do” list. If you choose a topic that comes from your own lived experience and thus is familiar, then the entire process becomes less intimidating and more manageable.

If you’ve completed a research study, then of course that’s an obvious topic. But even that needs refinement. Very few studies are “one and done” and none of them are simple. You need to decide how you will focus your paper. Will that focus be the method you used, the participants, or the analysis? For example, an emphasis on method might steer you to a qualitative journal (for a qualitative study) or a data-driven journal for a clinical trial. If your participants were adults with leukemia, you may target a journal that focuses on that specific population or illness. In other words, there are many ways to think about the research you have done.

Most studies have enough content for several articles. You need to think about each one and come up with a game plan for publication. Ideally, this happened early on in the planning phase of the study, but if you are coming to it later, that’s okay. Just give your study the attention it needs to carefully identify the topic(s) for your manuscript.

Another topic consideration might be to start small, especially if you are new to the writing and publishing world. The first thing I ever had published was a letter to the editor in the American Journal of Nursing, my senior year in college. Sure, it was only a letter, but it gave me the thrill of seeing my name in print. Next was an article in the Journal of the Student Nurses Association (now known as IMPRINT) reporting on a project I did at the end of my senior year.  If the thought of writing is making you feel a little overwhelmed, then consider a “compact” topic that you can write about in 5 to 8 pages versus 16 to 18. Success breeds success, as they say, and the goal here is to be successful, not famous (at least not at first).

Once you have an idea for a topic, try to write a one sentence “teaser” that encapsulates it. You should be able to describe your paper in one 12-to-15-word sentence. If you can’t, think about your topic again and refine your thinking. If you can’t be clear in one sentence, how will anyone ever understand what you are trying to say?

Conclusion

To summarize: choose your topic carefully. Think about how to make it interesting as well as informative. Remember that for a journal, an editor is going to want to publish new information, not just a re-hash of what’s already known. Even if you are writing about a tried-and-true topic, you need to find the angle that makes it new and different. And most important of all: your goal is to catch the eye of the editor. If the editor doesn’t like your article, it’s not going to be accepted. It really is that simple.

© 2025 by Writer’s Camp and Leslie Nicoll. CC-BY-ND 4.0

Author: Leslie H. Nicoll

Editor: Marilyn Oermann

Citation: Nicoll, LH. Manuscript Success and Choosing a Topic. The Writer’s Camp Journal, 1(1):6. doi:10.5281/zenodo.15443066