English grammar and style - Volume 21, Issue

Good Writing Practice In the September issue of MEW, Stephen Gilliver said that he couldn't tell us ‘the number of times I have read the word evidences used as a plural noun, in manuscripts written by non-native English speakers. While…

Document templates for medical writers - Volume 23, Issue

A document template is defined as ‘a file that serves as a starting point for a new document’. This article looks at the specialised templates used by medical writers in their trade with a focus on the commercially available products. Templates…

Medical writing in Italy in 2024: Results of the first Italian business and compensation survey - Volume 33, Issue

In Italy, little is known about the roles, activities, and compensation of medical writers and scientific communicators. A survey, tailored to local aspects and regulations, was conducted to capture a contemporary snapshot of the medical writing…

Can readers spot the AI impostor in healthcare writing? - Volume 32, Issue

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) writing assistants in the healthcare industry is becoming increasingly prevalent. These tools can help medical writers to generate content more quickly and efficiently, but they also raise concerns about the…

Medical Gems - Volume 25, Issue

Every discipline employs its own secretive words – jargon that allows initiates to communicate with one another in a way that excludes others. The world of medicine is no exception. The idioms used by doctors and surgeons range from the humorous to…

The Webscout - Volume 24, Issue

The word ‘plain’ in its original sense just meant ‘flat, smooth’. In the thirteenth century, it also gained the meaning ‘evident’. And from the fourteenth century on, ‘plain’ has been used in the way we understand it in the term ‘plain language’: to…

Race and ethnicity in biomedical literature: A narrative review - Volume 31, Issue

Race and ethnicity are not clearly defined in biomedical literature and misaligned with genomics and epigenomic findings; the guidelines for consistent reporting in publications and regulations from health authorities are lacking. Minority…

Good pharma - Volume 22, Issue

Drugs companies publish only a fraction of their results and keep much of the information to themselves. Drug companies are ‘debasing’ drug trials whose publication in journals can apparently confer scientific approval. Merck had fought for years to …

In the Bookstores - Volume 22, Issue

The Spirit Level

Ever had a ‘ping’ moment? This book might have been mine. I'm not a natural pessimist, but Western society today seems less cohesive and people more materialistic, stressed, unhealthy, and unhappy than in times gone by. Wealth and s…

In the Bookstores - Volume 26, Issue

What Every Medical Writer Needs to Know: Questions and Answers for the Serious Medical Author They say “don’t judge a book by its cover”, but the title of this book lends itself to curiosity. In What Every Medical Writer Needs to Know, Dr Robert B.…