Knowledge and attitudes of Indian surgeons regarding professional medical writing support

The number of scientific papers published from India each year is low. We tried to determine how often Indian surgeons publish in biomedical journals, challenges preventing them from publishing more often, their awareness of the international guidelines that acknowledge professional medical writing as an ethical service, and their willingness to hire medical writers for their publications.

A convenience sample of 100 of the surgeons attending a national conference were explained about the survey and asked to complete a survey questionnaire. All results were expressed as absolute frequencies and percentages.

Of the 81 who responded, 43 (53%) had never published. Only 31/81 (38%) had published in the last 5 years. The challenges preventing more frequent publication were reported to be the lack of support for carrying out statistical analyses (58%), lack of time (41%), lack of sufficient data (38%), and lack of support for literature search (37%). Twenty-two (27%) surgeons were aware that they could hire a professional medical writer (PMW), 26 (32%) knew that the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors allowed PMWs to contribute to articles published in the biomedical journals, 75 (93%) were interested in hiring medical writers or to consider it in the future. Only 6 (7.4%) showed no such interest.

There was poor awareness and great interest in hiring PMWs. It might be beneficial to increase the awareness of clinicians about the scientific expertise and communication skills of PMWs and how they can add value to biomedical publications.