CDIM Survey Guidelines

On this page, interested members will find complete submission guidelines, authorship requirements, publishing specifics, approximate timelines, and data management details for submitting thematic sections or questions to annual surveys. The most recent guideline updates are summarized in the following section.

CDIM Guidelines for Submitting Questions

Members are welcome to propose thematic question sections for the Annual Survey of Core Clerkship Directors, typically launching in early September and closing in early December. The CDIM Survey and Scholarship Committee strongly encourages submissions on topics in UME that can be readily answered by medicine clerkship directors.

While in development, surveys undergo rigorous editing, pre-testing, and pilot-testing to ensure adherence to standardized methodology. Submitters are notified in late April about the status of their sections or questions.

Updates Effective January 2026

For the 2026 Annual Survey of Core Clerkship Directors cycle, the CDIM Survey and Scholarship Committee amended the guidelines and requirements for thematic section proposals to ensure a diversity of member submissions while continuing to field an Annual Survey of high validity. Updates to the guidelines include the following:

Members may serve as an author on a maximum of three survey section submissions. They may serve as lead section proposal author for one survey section submission and must serve as a supporting author for any additional submissions.

Disclosure of the use of AI on survey section submissions is required. If AI is used for a submission that is accepted for inclusion in the Annual Survey, authors are required to attest that they reviewed and edited the content generated by AI and take full responsibility for the submission. Disclosing whether AI tools were used will not affect which submissions are selected for inclusion in the Annual Survey, as the CDIM Survey Committee will be blinded to this information during its proposal review process.

Although it is not required, first-time section submitters are strongly encouraged to seek mentorship support from the CDIM Survey and Scholarship Committee before submitting a proposal. Please email surveys@im.org to be paired with an experienced committee member who can provide suggested revisions and work with you to improve your proposal (that individual will be recused during the committee’s blinded proposal reviews).

Tips For Successful Submissions

Focus of Questions

Question sections topics should be relevant to and essential for undergraduate medical educators for informing organizational policies and initiatives, enhancing research, and, ultimately, better understanding and advancing the discipline and profession represented by CDIM members.

Successful survey sections:

  • are timely, important, and represent members’ diverse interests
  • are well developed, well written, and avoid bias
  • close gaps in knowledge, support innovation, and have potential to change practice
  • are of reasonable cognitive load and completion time
  • are answerable by clerkship directors
  • can be feasibly transformed into scholarship
  • have not recently been studied in the Annual Survey

CDIM Survey Guidelines

The Survey and Scholarship Committee assists CDIM members in educational scholarship through the content that they submit for inclusion in the Annual Survey. While in development, CDIM Annual Surveys undergo rigorous editing, pre-testing, and pilot-testing to ensure adherence to standardized methodology. 

Members submitting question sections are required to digitally sign an acknowledgment of the below CDIM Annual Survey Guidelines within one week of question acceptance.

 

If your submitted items are accepted for inclusion, a subgroup of Survey and Scholarship Committee members and Alliance Surveys staff will assist in further developing your section(s). This requires prompt responses to revision requests, particularly during testing phases.
AAIM Surveys staff hold valid certificates in human subjects research training; all survey data collection is managed by Alliance Surveys staff. About one month prior to launch, staff submit the completed CDIM Annual Survey questionnaire for Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval. About one month after closure, authors are provided section summary results.

Publishing data in a timely manner is a primary goal of the Survey and Scholarship Committee. Lead authors are expected to produce draft manuscripts within six months of receiving the de-identified dataset. If a draft manuscript has not been produced within 12 months of receiving data, the committee liaison may be appointed as a primary author. 

Once section authors receive de-identified dataset and summary results, authors may utilize their own secondary analysis support; otherwise, a committee liaison will be available to field secondary analysis requests coordinated via Alliance Surveys staff. The committee urges authors to consider early whether Alliance committee and/or staff assistance will be needed. AAIM Surveys staff contribute a survey methodology section for editing and inclusion by authors; the committee liaison will contribute to drafting the manuscript and assist in selecting an appropriate publishing journal. We ask that the CDIM Survey and Scholarship Committee be named in a manuscript’s "Acknowledgments" unless contributions merit full authorship.

The Survey and Scholarship Committee and Alliance Surveys staff follow the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) publishing criteria; it’s expected that all authors will meet the ICMJE criteria if they’re involved in 1) subsequent drafting and/or revising of the manuscript; and 2) final approval of the manuscript for publication.

Extenuating circumstances can delay manuscripts indefinitely; to proactively address approval issues, committee liaisons assist in advancing manuscripts to publication. AAIM Surveys staff complete a standard IRB exemption application for each survey and notify authors in advance about additional exemptions needed from their local IRB. A scholarly journal may expect additional review if an AAIM Surveys staff member served as the study’s principal investigator (PI) but not as coauthor.

CDIM Survey and Scholarship Committee

The Committee, Committee Chair, and AAIM Surveys staff maintain the following roles:

  • Oversight of survey submissions, selection, editing, piloting, and data collection processes; obtaining IRB exemption; seeking pilot testers and suggested edits from the CDIM Council; developing a survey nonrespondent contact strategy; preparing de-identified datasets and summary results for distribution to section leads and authors. For these contributions, we ask that the CDIM Survey and Scholarship Committee be named in the manuscript. "Acknowledgments" unless they have contributed enough to a particular section to merit full authorship.
  • Providing a draft survey methods section to contributing authors after the summary results have been reported.
  • To ensure data integrity and confidentiality of responses, as well as file version control and best practices for data cleaning and data management, the survey data master files will be housed by AAIM Surveys. This also allows for the archiving of such files.

The committee and AAIM Surveys staff will communicate with survey contributing authors to remind them that they have six months to draft a manuscript reporting their findings. The CDIM Survey and Scholarship Committee reserves the right to assume leadership for manuscript preparation if, after a reasonable length of time, the section lead author(s) does not make progress in doing so.

The CDIM Survey and Scholarship Committee Chair, Vice-Chair, survey writing team committee members, and AAIM Surveys staff are available to assist authors with manuscript preparation, to answer questions about the data, or to address other questions pertaining to survey findings or interpretation. AAIM Surveys staff will prepare appropriate electronic files for CDIM Survey datasets such as codebooks and de-identified datasets in a file format suitable for authors. The Committee encourages survey writing teams to consider at an early stage whether they will require data analysis support. AAIM Surveys staff can provide guidance, but due to competing responsibilities, staff must focus on the extensive survey administration, data cleaning, and summary results reporting aspect of the survey process.

The CDIM Survey and Scholarship Committee and AAIM Surveys staff:

  • Can assist with accessing and retrieving previous CDIM survey results that may be relevant and/or related to current survey findings helpful in manuscript preparation.
  • Through survey writing teams, meet with survey contributing authors to discuss manuscript preparation.
  • Will provide feedback to authors whose questions are not accepted for inclusion in the survey.
  • Should inform section submitters in late April about the acceptance or rejection of their content.

Submissions Closed

The call for 2026 CDIM Annual Survey thematic section submissions is now closed. Submitters were notified of their status in late April 2026.

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