President's Message - Volume 24, Issue

Dear EMWA Members, As we came together in the historic city of The Hague in November 2015 for another successful and enjoyable conference, we were particularly delighted to welcome our Benelux members who turned out in force. The usual EMWA…

Lingua Franca and Beyond - Volume 24, Issue

Knowing that the main theme of this issue of Medical Writing is writing for the lay audience, I was thinking hard about what would be the most relevant topic to discuss in the Lingua Franca and Beyond section. My thoughts went to a topic that…

Medical Devices - Volume 28, Issue

Medical devices should certainly be included on any list of trends in medical writing. That impression was only reinforced by the strong interest in device writing evident at this year’s EMWA spring conference. The three medical device workshops on…

Social media and altmetrics: The pharma perspective - Volume 30, Issue

The increased prevalence of healthcare-related social media and other web-based communications has generated interest in tools that measure the attention and engagement of published content. In the context of medical research publications, the use…

Regulatory Matters - Volume 30, Issue

Calling all medical writers:

Focus your writing with lean authoring

In today’s medical writing environment, authors are routinely faced with expedited timelines to write documents about highly complex studies with overwhelming amounts of data. Revi…

The Crofter: Sustainable Communications - Volume 30, Issue

Greetings from the croft! I think it’s a neat coincidence that I have the pleasure to write my first editorial to this edition of The Crofter in the Medical Writing special issue on mentorship. I don’t have an official mentor but ever since I…

Medical Communications and Writing for Patients - Volume 33, Issue

Section Editor: Lisa Chamberlain James Encouraging vaccination through clever and abstruse incentives Author: Yannick Borkens The COVID-19 pandemic kept the world on tenterhooks for several years beginning in 2019. Well over 7 million people had…

HIV vaccine clinical trials: An overview - Volume 27, Issue

More than 30 years after the discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus as the agent that causes AIDS, an effective vaccine against this deadly disease has yet to be developed. The pathway to the development of a vaccine has been riddled with…

Carbon footprint of clinical trials: a high-level literature review - Volume 31, Issue

Thousands of clinical trials are conducted globally each year. Yet, little is known about their environmental impact. This paper presents the results of a high-level literature review of the carbon footprint of clinical trials. Five papers were…

Differences between writing for medical devices and pharmaceuticals: An update - Volume 31, Issue

Although the medical device and pharmaceutical industries are related, they are governed by distinct regulatory systems. Despite the similarities, the inherent differences between medical devices and drugs have implications for clinical research…