What do writers need to know about user testing? - Volume 24, Issue

Increasing amounts of information are being made available to patients – but how do we know if we are getting it right and meeting people's needs? In this article, we describe how we have employed user testing to test and improve not just…

European Science Editing: May 2015 picks - Volume 24, Issue

In the ironically titled ‘The increasing pseudodignification of medical prose’, retired consultant Neville W. Goodman bemoans the failure of medical writers (by which he means people who write scientific papers) to use simple words.1 Goodman…

Modern mentorship: Developing medical writing mentor-mentee relationships in the virtual world - Volume 30, Issue

Mentorship is often viewed as a traditional personal relationship model, where the mentor meets face-to-face with a mentee within the same organisation or group.  However, I have been mentoring medical writers success fully for many years using…

Profile: An interview with Dr Gustavo A. Silva on the concept of public health in medical writing and translation - Volume 22, Issue

We often tend to consider the different branches of medical translation as unique islands of knowledge. We may imagine translators specialising in single areas such as oncology, ophthalmology, gynaecology, and so on. Nevertheless, there are indeed…

Manuscript Writing - Volume 21, Issue

Help, I can't shorten my abstract! Oh, yes you can (Part 2 of 2) Abstracts may be the most important part of a manuscript because they are often the only part that is read and used as an information source, and because they are also used by readers…

Is cheap outsourcing a threat to your career? - Volume 24, Issue

Many writers are concerned that the rise of cheap freelance medical content outsourcing will be a threat to their careers. Yet while outsourcing may be a cheaper option, there is no guarantee that the quality will be superior. There are also…

Veterinary Medical Writing - Volume 30, Issue

The placebo-by-proxy effect – another argument against homeopathy

Chances are you know about the placebo effect. There are many variables to study,1 but in general, the placebo effect means that if you believe in a positive outcome of a drug, you wi…

Good Writing Practice - Volume 28, Issue

The repetition of a word becomes more distracting (i.e., redundant) in proportion to increased number. The word may be considered as individual (e.g., the’s in a title) or as a constituent of a larger syntactic unit (a phrase or clause).

Biostatistics, data management, and medical writing: A multidisciplinary approach to the development of the CTD integrated summaries - Volume 29, Issue

Analyses of integrated databases of efficacy and safety are a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requirement. They are very useful in evaluating the safety and efficacy data gathered in multiple clinical studies. However, their utility is dependent…

Good Writing Practice - Volume 25, Issue

Personalism results from a story-line narration rather than a thematic-focused description. This story-line narration is focused on agents as sentence (or clause) subjects and their actions as verbs, rather than themes represented by noun subjects…