The "Down to Earth" series, a collection of pieces dedicated to providing practical knowledge for academic psychiatrists, is a new and exciting feature for Academic Psychiatry. The idea for this column evolved from an Academic Psychiatry editorial published in 2004 which provided a "down to earth" approach on how to review a manuscript (
1). This "how to" piece proved to be quite useful and is still widely accessed and utilized both by individuals and by those seeking to teach workshops for residents and early career faculty.
Part of the mission of our journal is to provide a forum for work that furthers knowledge in psychiatric education and stimulates improvements in academic psychiatry. The "Down to Earth" series offers an opportunity to provide practical, useful knowledge for our readers who are approaching the many tasks related to psychiatric education and research. These invited pieces are meant to be user-friendly. As such, they often provide "tips," utilize tables and figures, and summarize processes in a step by step fashion. They do not follow the typical format of our more scholarly submissions. Rather, they clearly and comprehensively outline or highlight topics that are of particular salience to our readership.
The editors welcome ideas for future topics for these "Down to Earth" columns. We have already published a piece on how to get started in educational research (
2) and are publishing a companion set of articles in this issue on how to apply to a psychiatry residency or a child and adolescent psychiatry residency (
3,
4). It is our hope that this "Down to Earth" series will become a "how to" treasure for our field.