Publishing on a Shoestring: Understanding Barriers, Challenges, and Unique Opportunities to Academic Productivity in Psychiatry

Purpose of review: Clinical track faculty within psychiatry may struggle to meet goals for academic scholarship, particularly publishing. In this review, we explore potential barriers to publication and solutions to support early career psychiatrists.

Recent findings: Current evidence highlights challenges for faculty throughout academic practice, including barriers at the individual and systems levels. Within psychiatry, publication has favored biological studies with significant gaps in the literature serving as both an opportunity and challenge. Interventions underscore the importance of mentorship and propose incentivization to facilitate academic scholarship among clinical track faculty. Barriers to publication within psychiatry exist at the level of the individual, system, and field itself. This review shares potential solutions from across the medical literature and an example of an intervention from our own department. More studies are needed within the field of psychiatry to understand how to best support early career faculty members in their academic productivity, growth, and development.