TY - JOUR T1 - Meta-work: <em>how</em> we research is as important as <em>what</em> we research JF - British Journal of General Practice JO - Br J Gen Pract SP - 130 LP - 131 DO - 10.3399/bjgp22X718757 VL - 72 IS - 716 AU - Yvette Pyne AU - Stuart Stewart Y1 - 2022/03/01 UR - http://bjgp.org/content/72/716/130.abstract N2 - ‘Manuscripts, like sea turtle hatchlings, face many hazards during their harrowing journey from the nest to the open sea, and many never make it.’1 With MEDLINE indexing an average of two new citations every minute,2 the volume of successful medical research publication belies the extent of academic work that never reaches the DOI finish line.3 Almost half of all published abstracts do not lead to published results and papers,4 and there are likely many reasons why this happens: whether the research itself was not finished because of funding problems, the research was completed but not written up, or the researchers could not find a journal that would publish their findings. A common thread weaving through these issues relates to the availability of time and the ability to use that time to produce only high-quality writing. Often the brightest minds of academia find that they are instead doing low-value work such as form-filling, reading and responding to faculty email chains, and ‘copy-pasting’ ideas between multiple similar documents; this bureaucracy has become such a recognised issue that it is now the subject of a national governmental review.5 Even when researchers engage in typically higher-value work such as reading and interpreting academic literature, the process can be overly iterative with too much reliance on human memory of the content of hundreds of papers rather than using external digital tools to capture meaningful notes; notes that can … ER -