Pulses is a scholarly blog supported by a team of pharmacy education scholars.
Goals
- Pulses seeks to promote scholarly dialogue regarding challenges relating to pharmacy education.
- Pulses rapidly disseminates scholarly work and curates conversations around important scholarly issues
- Pulses is a venue for early inquiry (e.g., questions in formation, promising frameworks or approaches, preliminary evidence) in scholarly teaching
- Pulses posts share specific scholarly initiatives, projects, or observations that are being investigated by educators. Posts also:
- focus on the educational challenge
- ground the suggestions or approach in evidence
- provide a call to action or inspire educational change
- Pulses aims to foster a community of scholars in pharmacy education by supporting discussion and scholarly solutions to everyday problems.
Submissions to Pulses can address one or more of these needs:
- Defining the Gap – Authors can declare a gap (i.e. need for more scholarly activity) in a specific area of the literature and invite others to contribute to resolving that gap.
- Discussing Persistent Challenges in Pharmacy Education – Authors present recurring, predictable, and troublesome teaching and/or learning challenges that could benefit from the process of scholarly inquiry (see Figure 5.1).
- Describing Useful Theory, Frameworks, & Models – Authors describe a model from outside pharmacy education and its application to a pharmacy teaching or learning challenge or inquiry.
- Promoting Promising Methods of Scholarly Inquiry – Authors present approaches and/or methods from disciplines (evaluation sciences, implementation science, etc.) that could assist pharmacy educators in scholarly teaching-related inquiry.
- Enhancing Scholarly Quality – Authors detail approaches to advance rigor in the design of scholarly projects, their implementation, analysis of data and or presentation/writing.
What doesn’t fit in Pulses?
Pulses is not a venue for “how to teach” or “my thoughts and reactions to” types of writing. While important, there are other venues for “how to” work, such as a teaching blog. Stories and experiences can be crafted into Pulses articles, but they must be “informed” opinions and substantiated by evidence. For example: discussing a classroom experience through a theoretical framework or raising questions about the experience by relating it to other published work.
What do you mean by “scholarly dialogue”?
When facing teaching and learning challenges, pharmacy educators seek to make evidence-informed decisions. Evidence to support educational changes may come from theories, models, frameworks, empirical studies, literature reviews, white papers, and best practices articles. Posts should situate their information/message within the existing evidence in the field and extend the academic discussion into new territory.
Who reads Pulses?
The primary audience is pharmacy faculty. Pulses articles are also read by pharmacy residents, students, and other health professions educators across the globe. Pulses articles have been viewed more than 98,000 times since being launched in 2017. Readership consists of more than 51,000 unique visitors across 150+ countries. The reach of Pulses and the number of article views continues to grow each month.
Who should publish?
Pulses posts are welcome from all authors, including pharmacy students, residents, graduate students, postgraduate fellows, faculty members, and administrators. Pulses welcomes those authors who are new to the scholarship of teaching and learning and wish to:
- gain experience articulating and disseminating their ideas,
- hone their writing skills,
- build a reputation in a specific area, or
- engage others in discussion around inquiry into challenging teaching issues.
Submissions are also encouraged from established authors who wish to:
- help guide the academy toward meaningful questions,
- gain experience with new arguments,
- experiment at the cutting edges of inquiry or
- challenge the academy in the pursuit of scholarly rigor and quality.
Trainees are strongly encouraged to engage a faculty mentor that is seasoned in scholarly inquiry. The ICMJE recommendations for authorship should be met, taking particular note of the requirement for obtaining permission to include others in acknowledgements and as co-authors.
You can find more information about our author guidelines here.
Contact Us
Email pulsesrx@gmail.com
Meet our editors/peer coaches and learn more about them!
Pulses 