So You Want to Provide Insights

Here are some guidelines for you.

For starters read this: George Orwell on Effective Writing.

Commentaries provoke and enlighten. They can also provide an opportunity to come across as very serious, to be mischievous, to alert and inform readers and to provide some diversion from the day-to-day earnestness of healthcare policy and practice. Don’t forget to make a point. Selected writers we feature do this well. Don’t polarize. Analyze. Here at Longwoods we might ask: is it timely, well argued, fresh, clear and news worthy?

(This is the kind of language used by “op-ed” editors of the Globe and Mail. We’ve borrowed bits and pieces.)

Here are the rules:

Must be non-academic, we are looking for your opinion / thoughts / insights.

Body of the submission should be 600 to 900 words or so. Include a title, a twitter length abstract and 5 keywords.

We reserve the right to edit.

Accepted submissions go online in the Insights section of Longwoods.com and will be featured from time to time in the eLetter.

We reserve the right to publish submissions in any journal, format or medium.

Readers’ submissions may not have the benefit of full review by copy editors. Please have an editor/proof reader polish each submission.

We reserve the right not to publish any submission without explanation.

Submit your Insights to publisher@longwoods.com 

Although these pieces are non-academic we understand that sometimes you will need to cite source material – please follow these guidelines.

References

The use of footnotes and endnotes is strongly discouraged. Instead, short explanatory remarks should be placed parenthetically in the text.

Longwoods follows a modified APA (American Psychological Association) style for referencing source material. In-text references should be placed in parentheses and consist of last name of the author(s) and the year of publication of the work to which reference has been made. No punctuation separates the two items.

Longwoods has adopted the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) system (see: https://www.doi.org/ for more information). Please be sure to include DOI numbers in your citations where ever possible. See examples below in the In-text Referencing section.

In-Text References

One Author:

The theory was first propounded in 1970 (Goodenough 1971).

Alternatively, author surnames may be integrated into the text, followed immediately by the year of publication in parentheses:

Goodenough (1971) was the first to propound the theory.

Two Authors:

EI has been proven to positively affect an organization’s success (Cooper and Sawaf 1997).

Multiple Authors/Citations:

Any health organization could potentially benefit from this type of approach (Madden et al. 1995).

Madden et al. (1995) propose the following solutions …

This trend is reflected in recent surveys of healthcare organizations (Gaudine 2000; Pimentel 2000; Canadian Physiotherapy Association 2000; Parent et al. 2001)

In-text citations requiring page references to quoted material should be styled as follows:

(Goodenough et al. 1979: 22-23; Simcoe 1980: 734-35.)

REFERENCE LIST

Ensure that all sources cited in the text are included in a "Reference" list at the end of the article. The accompanying list should be in alphabetical order and include full publication details. For multiple entries by the same author, arrange citations in chronological order, earliest year first. In the examples shown here, the following rules are observed:

• in citations with multiple authors, invert the first-name
• no parentheses for year of publication
• article titles in upper and lower case, enclosed in double quotation marks
• volume number, issue number, page references styled as follows (plain type - no italics): 15(3): 319-25 

SAMPLE REFERENCES

Anis, A.H., D. Guh and X. Wang. 2001. "A Dog’s Breakfast: Prescription Drug Coverage Varies Widely across Canada." Medical Care 39(4): 315-26.

Evans, R. 2013. "It Doesn't Have to Be This Way." Healthcare Policy 8(4): 10-18. doi:10.12927/hcpol.2013.23400.

Boyatzis, R., D. Goleman and K. Rhee. 2000. "Clustering Competence in Emotional Intelligence: Insights from the Emotional Competence Inventory (ECI)." In R. Bar-On and J.D.A. Parker, eds., The Handbook of Emotional Intelligence. San Fransisco, CA: Jossey Bass.

Drinka, T.J.K. and P.G. Clark. 2000. Healthcare Teamwork: Interdisciplinary Practice and Teaching. Westport, CT: Auburn House

Shortell, S.M., J. Zimmerman, D.M. Rousseau, R.R. Gillies, Wagner, E.A. Draper, W.A. Knaus and J. Duffy. 1994. "The Performance of Intensive Care Units: Does Good Management Make a Difference?" Medical Care 32(5): 508-25.

Birch, S., G. Kephart, G.T. Murphy, L. O'Brien-Pallas. R. Alder R and A. MacKenzie. 2009. "Health Human Resources Planning and the Production of Health: Development of an Extended Analytical Framework for Needs-Based Health Human Resources Planning." Journal of Public Health Management and Practice. Nov;15(6 Suppl):S56-61. doi: 10.1097/PHH.0b013e3181b1ec0e.

Citations of all material accessed on-line should be as complete as possible and include all the information that would normally be cited for a print source. In addition, the date of access/retrieval should be included.

Ontario Canadian Intergovernmental Conference Secretariat. 2005. "A 10-Year Plan to Strengthen Health Care." Retrieved July 4, 2008. <https://www.scics.gc.ca/cinfo04/800042005_e.pdf>.