President's Message - Volume 26, Issue

It’s autumn again and most of you will have returned from your vacations by now reenergised and ready for the year ahead. The Executive Committee has been busy planning our conference in Cascais scheduled for November 2–4. We are planning to hold 29…

Out On Our Own - Volume 25, Issue

Editorial Welcome to the OOOO section of Medical Writing. Whilst members who attended the free lancers’ networking meetings in The Hague (November 2015) or Munich (May 2016) may have noticed the recent changing of the guard at the Freelance…

Message from the President - Volume 21, Issue

Dear Members I am sure you are all very familiar with this situation – sitting in front of a blank piece of paper (or to be more accurate a blank screen) and wondering where to start. Beginnings and endings always seem to be the trickiest part, but…

English Grammar and Style - Volume 23, Issue

Pronouns are useful referents (i.e. the thing doing the referring) to avoid repetition of words (usually nouns). Although personal pronouns (he, she, and I, in particular) are infrequent in medical writing, the neutral ‘it’ and the demonstrative…

Writing for patients: When and how? - Volume 29, Issue

The move towards patient engagement and patient involvement in healthcare decisions (“shared care”) has triggered a raft of new guidances from regulatory authorities, accompanied by new regulations mandating that pharmaceutical companies engage with…

Medical Communications - Volume 24, Issue

Dear all, However experienced you are, and whatever ‘level’ medical writer you may be, we all share the same pain… document review processes. Every medical writer has at least one horror story related to review cycles going awry, and the mere…

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…

Preclinical studies - Volume 26, Issue

Welcome to this special issue about nonclinical and preclinical research. Nonclinical and preclinical research is the first step toward new drug development, where scientists investigate mechanism of action, pharmacokinetics, and safety. Many…

Legal remedies for medical ghostwriting: Imposing fraud liability on guest authors of ghostwritten articles - Volume 22, Issue

There are persistent concerns about the influence of the pharmaceutical and device industries on the medical literature, and particularly on the reporting of clinical trials, which can include the distortion of the true evidence base of medical…

In The Bookstores - Volume 25, Issue

Guidelines for Reporting Health Research: A User’s Manual By David Moher (Editor), Douglas Altman (Editor), Kenneth Schulz (Editor), Iveta Simera (Editor), Elizabeth Wager (Editor) Wiley Blackwell, 2014. ISBN: 978-0-470-67044-6 (paperback) 32.99…