Abstract
This is not only a book for those starting to write — experienced authors, editors, even readers can benefit. Most contributors are professional editors of medical journals or clinicians holding chairmanships of editorial boards. In addition to the writing of papers there is advice on how to compose letters, case reports, topic reviews, abstracts for scientific meetings, and a chapter on ‘Style – what is it, and does it matter?’ There are bad and good examples of tables and graphics, as well as advice about illustrations and micrographs. There is sound sense which even applies to the reading of papers, like ‘abstracts are frequently the only part of the paper that is read’. I would have liked to read about how to write book reviews, which could be included in the next edition.
Most chapters are well summarized by ‘boxes’ of guidelines. Also constructive responses to your paper being rejected, which happens to everybody.
An outstanding chapter comes from Lilleyman on ‘Titles, abstracts and authors’. He exhibits his sense of humour clearly imbibed from Richard Asher's ‘A Sense of Asher: A New Miscellany’— a tonic better than an antidepressant, and whose ‘easy reading, hard writing’, is a comfort to the vast majority. Here are some samples of Lilleyman's views:
‘Medical journals are dull — but there is dull and there is very dull.’
‘Since most medical papers describe statistics of underwhelming importance, to make them very dull to boot is a double crime.’
On a title he writes, ‘… it should convey, in easily understood terms, what the paper is about. It should also be as short as possible and it should excite rather than stifle interest’. ‘Do not be sensationalist’ which can ‘be left to tabloid professionals’.
He also recommends what to leave out and reading your paper aloud.
In other papers there are warnings about ‘salami slicing’— publishing piecemeal when a single high quality paper would have been preferable. The book concludes with chapters on ‘ethics of publication’ (including data manipulation and exclusion, suppression of inconvenient facts, fabrication, falsification and plagiarism), and ‘the future: electronic publishing’.
A research worker when asked whether he had read a particular paper, replied ‘I don’t read papers, I write them’. If you are not of that ilk, I can heartily recommend this meaty booklet to you.