Publishing Your Medical Research Paper: What They Don't Teach You in Medical School

British Medical Journal, Feb 27, 1999 by Trisha Greenhalgh

Publishing Your Medical Research Paper: What They Don't Teach You in Medical School

Daniel W Byrne Lippincott Williams and Wilkins, 16.95 [pounds sterling], pp 288 ISBN 0683 300 741

Rating *

Nothing makes my toes curl more than books that promise "200 expert tips" on a subject which your professors foolishly and inexplicably omitted from the curriculum when you were at university. Such books are almost invariably published in north America, written in a slack, simplistic, anti-academic style, and slip unconsciously into jargon when anything complex has to be explained. They tend to be replete with numbered or bulleted lists, clip art, silly icons, and unnecessarily culture-bound examples. They often shamelessly repackage precisely what was on the curriculum at your university and are usually about four times as long as they need to be for the content they offer.

Extraordinarily, despite having all the faults above, this book has managed to undersell itself in one important respect. The 3-D lettering on its bright yellow, orange, purple, and blue cover fails to inform the prospective buyer that it is not about publishing medical research papers at all but about planning a good research study, following it through, analysing the results sensibly (the author is a statistician by training), and presenting honest and valid conclusions so as to maximise the chances of publication. The student who considers buying it only when he or she is at the writing up stage has missed the boat, and hence I predict this book may well miss its market.

The meat of the book--sections on framing hypothesis-driven questions, assuring methodological rigour, and applying the right statistical tests to properly collected data--is unoriginal and somewhat dated, but it is useful, accurate, well cross referenced, and extremely well indexed. However, I found its "in your face" presentation so off putting that I almost chose to return it unreviewed and forfeit my fee.

As an attempt to bridge the cultural divide between American and British medical science, it is inept. A table on "British diphthongs" tells us that the words "labour" and "haematology" are "problematic" and that the "preferred usage" should be standard US spelling. More fundamentally, the bibliography comprises almost exclusively other US texts, and the inflexible guidelines for presenting postgraduate theses, presumably derived from the author's home institution, are out of step with similar regulations in many UK universities.

This is a book whose publisher intends it to be piled high and sold none too cheap, which may serve the US market well. In Britain, however, it is hardly a bargain when home grown texts that are shorter, better written, more relevant, and gentler on the pocket are readily available.

Reviews are rated on a 4 star scale (4=excellent)

Trisha Greenhalgh, general practitioner, London