Interlude: Running Starts, Comparisons, and Common Errors

Here's my latest curated round-up of the best tips, tools, and resources on scientific and medical writing.

💌 Round-up

💻 From My Desk

How Running Starts Can Leave Your Reader Behind
In effective scientific and medical writing, an author will smoothly lead their reader from one idea to the next. But when authors get a running start, they get ahead of their readers and risk leaving them behind. Learn how to revise running starts to help guide your reader through your writing.

The Right Words to Describe Comparisons
Many scientific and medical authors use the phrases "compared to" and "compared with" interchangeably. But these phrases have different meanings. If you're unsure which phrase to use, you can make simple substitutions that will be clearer for readers AND reduce your word count.

👓 Reading

The Reader's Brain: How Neuroscience Can Make You a Better Writer
I recently finished this book by Yellowless Douglas. Although I hoped for more scientific support, I liked the five-category structure—clarity, continuity, coherence, concision, and cadence—and enjoyed the author's acerbic humor.

No study is ever flawless: A scoping review of common errors in biomedical manuscripts
"The most reported common errors included inappropriate study design, inadequate sample size, poor statistical analysis, and unclear and inadequate description of methods. Abstracts not reflecting the content of the paper were the most frequent general common error in biomedical manuscripts."

Recommendations for including or reviewing patient reported outcome endpoints in grant applications
"Based on existing international guidelines developed through rigorous, stakeholder engaged, formal consensus processes, this article gives practical recommendations on what information on patient reported outcomes should be included in grant applications, along with example text to demonstrate how to deal with each recommendation."

Gender Disparity in Citations in High-Impact Journal Articles
"In this study, articles written by women in high-impact medical journals had fewer citations than those written by men, particularly when women wrote together as primary and senior authors. These differences may have important consequences for the professional success of women and achieving gender equity in academic medicine."

Scientific publishing’s new weapon for the next crisis: the rapid correction
"Any crisis that requires scientific information in a hurry will produce hurried science, and hurried science often includes miscalculated analyses, poor experimental design, inappropriate statistical models, impossible numbers, or even fraud. Having the agility to produce and publicize work like this without having the ability to correct it just as quickly is a curiously persistent oversight in the global scientific enterprise."

Challenges in Identifying the Retracted Status of an Article
"In this study, journal websites and bibliographic databases did not consistently display the retracted status of articles....The ICMJE recommends that retractions should be “prominently labelled,” and we propose that an explicit recommendation to add a prefix of “Retracted:” to the title of a retracted publication would fulfill this aim. This change would provide a consistent visual signal to the reader and would change the metadata that can be ingested into citation managers."

🧰 Tools

Capitalize My Title
Do you debate which words you need to capitalize in titles? This tool will help you format your titles and headings according to the main capitalization styles, including AMA, APA, MLA, and Chicago.

💬 Quote

"If you detect a needlessly complex style when you read, look for characters and actions so that you can unravel for yourself the complexity the writer needlessly inflicted on you.” ― Joseph M. Williams

Thank you so much for reading.

Warmly,

Crystal