Writing Scientific and Medical Papers Clearly

My concern in this presentation is with the falling standard of papers, particularly primary research articles, in the scientific and medical literature. Few of our younger generation of scientists (and many older ones) have never had specific training in how to write a good article, and yet this is the major product of all research effort that has been done, perhaps over a year or more. This is a situation that has to be corrected by all institutions, universities, and similar bodies, who need to introduce into the curriculum a course (not just a token lecture) that deals with the complexity of writing a lucid article that is succinct and written with style. To assist in this exercise, I have now produced a manual (1) that goes step-by-step through the process of writing and publishing scientific papers in such a way that they have much greater chance of being accepted by learned journals. Anat Rec, 301:1493-1496, 2018. © 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.