AMWA – EMWA – ISMPP Joint Position Statement on Predatory Publishing - Volume 28, Issue

The American Medical Writers Association (AMWA), the European Medical Writers Association (EMWA), and the International Society for Medical Publication Professionals (ISMPP) recognise the challenges to scientific publishing being posed by predatory…

Datavision™ – What do medical writers need to know? - Volume 23, Issue

Datavision™ is a publication planning software tool that is widely used across the healthcare industry to manage publication programmes. Medical writers are one of the key Datavision user groups, and need to know how to use the elements of the…

Science communication: A guide to creating online scientific content that engages - Volume 30, Issue

Science communication plays an important role in educating the public about scientific knowledge. Until recently, publishing in research journals and presenting at science conferences were the only options available to scientists for sharing their…

Science for all: Is it all about the publication of data, or beyond? - Volume 31, Issue

This article presents an overview of open access initiatives by researchers, journals, government bodies, and regulatory authorities. Open access initiatives are valuable to the scientific community and have increased the amount of clinical research…

English Grammar and Style - Volume 22, Issue

We have three articles in this edition. Pamela Haendler's contribution deals with the medical writer as a reviewer and quality checker. Because of their close involvement with all of the documentation on a project, the medical writers involved are…

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…