Publishing Quality Improvement Projects: Know the Guidelines Before Starting Your Project

Abstract

Health care clinicians, educators, and students who plan and implement quality improvement (QI) projects must know reporting guidelines for successful project planning and publication. We aimed to identify QI guidelines, which authors can locate, and highlight how best to use them for manuscript preparation. We also address guidelines for educational QI projects. Because of the increasing number of Doctor of Nursing Practice projects generated, these students and their mentors must be familiar with commonly used guidelines for reporting QI projects to facilitate peer review, demonstrate quality and rigor of work, reduce revisions, and potentially accelerate a paper's acceptance for publication.

Keywords: Quality improvement; mentors; peer review; publishing; students.