Gained in Translation - Volume 21, Issue

Science at the multilingual crossroads With Medical Writing's third issue, this seems to be a good time to recall why this journal features a section on multilingual aspects – and why this section is called what it's called. Medical writing,…

Good Writing Practice - Volume 30, Issue

Grammatical misagreement in tense

I – Present, present perfect

Introduction

Each of the sections of a journal article contains anticipated conceptual components, which can be expressed by a specific verb tense for the perspective of time and the d…

Teaching scientific writing to non-native English speakers - Volume 22, Issue

Scientists and clinicians around the world are facing the tyranny of publishing in English in journals with high-impact factors. The workshop format is not suitable for language teaching. Participants in workshops on scientific writing whose first…

Never P alone: The value of estimates and confidence intervals - Volume 25, Issue

How results are reported influences how they are interpreted. Although P values have been granted great importance, they have no clinical interpretation. Rather, they are a measure of chance as an explanation for the results. Their either or…

Recommended procedures for retracting articles: Inadequate and patchily applied? Analysis of a recent article in PLoS One - Volume 23, Issue

Retraction of research articles ruins careers, dents confidence in the scientific literature, and can have a profound impact on meta-analyses. Retraction rates have seen a big recent rise, as journals act increasingly quickly to remove articles that…

In vitro plants: How to open a jar containing bioactive phytochemicals - Volume 32, Issue

Due to the increasing demand for phytochemicals, plant in vitro cultures are a noteworthy, environmentally sustainable method, enabling the biotechnological production of bioactive compounds. Medical writers can find writing scientific articles in…

Medical Communications - Volume 25, Issue

Most medical writers cut their teeth on manuscripts, and these documents are often mistakenly believed to be ‘easy’ to write. However, the truth is that with all documents, they are easy to write badly but require skill and knowledge to write well.…

Manuscript Writing - Volume 21, Issue

Guidelines for manuscript writing: Here to help Although sometimes maligned, guidelines make manuscript writing easier and increase the chances of getting published. A good set of guidelines can be used as a checklist (many even include…

In the Bookstores - Volume 26, Issue

A research paper is often the culmination of years’ worth of data and experiments, successes and failures, doubts and triumphs, as well as a balancing act between many different opinions from different authors. Writing one can be a daunting task,…

Publication planning and patient-reported outcomes: Demonstrating value in a multi-stakeholder era - Volume 27, Issue

Patient-reported outcomes (PROs) are an essential element to demonstrate the value of a health intervention. In many ways, PROs represent the ultimate “real-world” data, yet the drive towards “Big Data” has focused onroutinely collected data from…