Keynote for Fast Publishing by Writing Technical Note
Type of Article: Editorial
Abdeldjalil KHELASSI
Editor-in-chief Medical Technologies Journal
Abstract:
Writing-up of technical information is consuming time and efforts,
however the exponential grow of innovations and finding should be relevantly
shared by publications. Technical note (also known as innovation or technical
development in some journals) is among short scientific article
published by medical journals and sometime engineering journals. It is produced
for describing a new technic, procedure, or development relevant for medical
system. Sometimes, technical note describes the modification of an existing
technics. This article presents a simple guide on writing Technical Notes and
includes basic arguments as definition, appellations, and structure.
Keywords: Publishing, Technical Note, Scientific writing.
Corresponding author: Abdeldjalil KHELASSI, Abou Beker Belkaid University of Tlemcen, Algeria.,
khelassi.a@gmail.com
©2017-2019
KNOWLEDGE KINGDOM PUBLISHING.
1- Introduction
1.1.Background
The
scientific innovation is in progress very fast. The patents application grows
to more than three million applications by 2017 worldwide [1]. The number of
worldwide patents in medical technology is 118710 only in 2016 that represent
4.5%, adding to biotechnology 55479 and pharmaceuticals 106704, to attend 10.6%
[1]. Although not all patents represent innovation and not all innovations are
represented by patents, the technical note still the most used publication
channel for innovations [1]. It is due to its easy form of publication and the
big impact of journals against intellectual property organizations.
Publication,
which could be open access or embargo, is also very fast. Only Medline database
contains more than 26 million records [2] from 5,639
selected publications [3] covering
biomedicine and health from 1950 to the present. In addition, more than 1.3
million publication recorded only in 2018 [2-3], and very useful, more than 27 million
citations recorded in 2018 [3].
The
publication should respect some standards criteria to be accepted and reused in
the scientific community. From the coherent content, correct structure
standards, to the reputed channels. The technical note stills helping the
technologic evolution. It is a short scientific publication called technical
note, innovation, or technical development describing a technical process [4]. This
paper presents some notes about writing technical notes. We focus this area by
including the basic arguments as definition, appellations, and structure.
1.2. Definition
Technical Note
is a research article, very short with few references and figures. It is mainly
written to describe a new process, technic, or device in clinical medicine or
management. It is also used to describe an upgrade of an existing process,
technic, or device. The description should be validated by a software tool presentation
or experimental computational method [4-6].
1.3.
Appellation
Several
journals publish technical notes, but some of them publish these research
articles in another appellation. For example, the technical note is called innovations
in some ophthalmology journals. It is also called technical developments in
some imaging journals [4]. Some of them keep the appellation of original
article for technical note some time the authors specify that it is a technical
note on the title and some time without specification.
2. Structure of technical
note
Technical
notes follow the same structure as other original articles (table1), they begin
with a short abstract followed by introduction, material and methods, results,
discussion and conclusion. Sometime the sections method and results are regrouped
in only one section called technic. The specificity of these articles is only
the maximum of words number is very small, few figures and few references are
permitted [4].
Table 1: Technical
note structures: two approach proposed by journal editors.
|
Approach 1 |
Approach 2 |
|
Title Abstract Keywords Introduction Material and Methods Results Discussion Conclusion References |
Title Abstract Keywords Introduction Technic Discussion Conclusion References |
The title is
the most important piece of an article. It is very important to introduce
all-important concepts on the title to attract readers to read the contents. It
almost contains a subtitle, which describe the type of the contribution or an
additional information explaining the meaning of the title. The abstract is the head text
of each scientific article. It represents a short description of the contents.
It describes also the most important information in the article as the aim,
methods, results and conclusions [7-9]. Several forms are used in the
literature for writing an abstract in which thirteen ways are indexed in [7]. The
choice depends essentially about the article type and the journals standard. Now
days, for technical note the journals requested the structured and graphical abstract
and some journals request both of them. Finally,
there should be 3-5 keywords at the end of the abstract, which describe the domains and research concerned by the article. These
words are very useful in the article indexing and retrieving. There is a vocabulary thesaurus of medical key words controlled by National Library of Medicine NLM: Medical Subject Headings MeSH.
A brief section
provides the background and context of the innovation or development. The aim,
features, and usefulness should be introduced in this section. If it is a
subject of upgrading an existing innovation, then relevant critics of the old innovation
and the advantages of the increment or modification should be highlighted.
2.2.2. Methods
This section
describes all technic development and validation methods. All the life cycle of
the innovation should be described (The analyze, the design, the realization
and the tests). All technical details (data, components, manufacturers) must be
provided to facilitate the reproduction of the technic. It should describe the
manner that the technic or innovation was tested and validated, by introducing
experiments materials, self-developed components, references of used components
and their licenses. Other technical details should be introduced according to
the described technic or innovation like equipment, suppliers ...etc.
Illustrations via schematics, photographs, line drawing, block diagrams are
well recommended in this section.
2.2.3. Results
This section
is to explain the function and performance of the innovation. It is limited and
short than in an original article. It must be confined to the specific message
of the innovation. This section must highlight the value and contribution of the
clinical diagnosis or management.
It is an
optional section. All contributors that not have the quality of authors should
be acknowledged in this section. The acknowledgments could be anonymous for
peoples who participate in the experiments like patients, and equipment
owners.
This section
includes the used references. The form of references should follow the
suggestions of the journal editor. The list of references should be short and
restraint only to the used and recent ones.
3. Ethics of technical notes
The publishing ethics is a common argument for all
type of contributions. As a scientific article, the technical
note must follow the ethics suggested by the institutional ethics committee and
journal editor. It is very difficult to restraint the publishing ethics in a
defined list, but in the literature, we find these arguments accepted and
published by the Committee Of Publication Ethics COPE: - Duplicate publication,
Data reproduction, Salami publishing, Plagiarism, Authorship problems, etc
The ethics arguments are very difficult to be detected
by editors then it is the responsibility of authors to respect these ethics.
4. Conclusion
The
technical note, innovation, or technical development is a short scientific
article describing an innovation, technic or development process. It is very important for industry
and health science to schedule technical notes in their notes due to the
simplicity of editing and their important impact. This article describes the
important arguments of publishing a technical note in higher standards.
5. Conflict of interest statement
The authors certify
that there is no conflict of interest with any financial organization in the
subject matter or materials discussed in this manuscript.
6. Acknowledgements
The author sincerely
thanks Dr. Mehrdad Jalalian for reviewing the paper and providing insightful
comments.
7. Author biographies
Dr Abdeldjalil Khelassi: is an
Associate Professor at Tlemcen University, Algeria. He obtained his Doctor in
Science (2013), Magister (2008) and Engineer (2004) in Computer Sciences from
the Department of Computer Science at Tlemcen University. His research interest
includes cognitive systems, knowledge-based systems, case-based reasoning,
distributed reasoning, fuzzy sets theory and health science. He is the editor
manager of Medical Technologies Journal and the co-editor in chief of
Electronic Physician Journal.
8. Reference
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[3] "
Statistical Reports on MEDLINE®/PubMed® Baseline Data". NLM. URL:
https://www.nlm.nih.gov/bsd/num_titles.html 2019-06-30. Retrieved 2019-06-30.
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& Peh, W. C. (2010). Writing a technical note. Singapore medical journal, 51(2),
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Retrieved 2019-06-30.
[7] Hartley, J., & Cabanac, G.
(2017). Thirteen Ways to Write an Abstract. Publications,
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[8] Jalalian
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