The journal Chest has started a new series of articles offering tips on writing for medical journals. This sounds like an excellent resource, as we agree with Dirckx, cited in the introduction:
“Modern medical literature is some of the most vapid, obscure, tortuous, and unreadable material in print.”
As described by the editors, the new section will…
…essentially consist of two formats: one consisting of actual examples of poor communication (eg, “What is wrong with this … ?”), with suggestions for how they might be improved; and the other addressing concepts related to communications in the field of medicine, such as the “Uniform Requirements for the Submission of Manuscripts to Biomedical Journals” and publishing ethics. Please inform us of any topic that you particularly wish to be addressed, and we will try to include it on our scheduled menu.
Excellent. Their first article in the series is “Preparing Manuscripts for Online Submission,” available for free here. Unfortunately, the article reads just like an instruction manual for online submission (in fact, the author admits it to be redundant with available information).
Maybe future installments will offer more interesting tips and suggestions [just so long as journals are never as accessible and engaging as Medgadget — ed].