Reviewers & Editors Share the Secret Sauce

Publishing Your Medical Research, 2^nd Edition reveals the secret sauce for maximizing the palatability of your manuscript submissions.

Edge reviews have featured exceptional books about the mechanics, inspiration, process, and editing of writing. What differentiates this offering by Daniel Byrne, MS, is data from two rounds of surveys of reviewers and editors identifying the most common flaws of submitted manuscripts that lead to revisions and rejections. Complete with figures that analyze top concerns. This data from inside the peer review machine is the key ingredient well-paired with practical guidance about how to avoid mistakes at each step from the initial design and implementation of research through reply to reviewers.

Byrne is a biostatistician and has more than two decades’ experience teaching and consulting in a Master’s of Science in Clinical Investigation program in which all students – most of whom are physician-scientists – develop, conduct, and publish research projects. Virtually all seek him out for stats consultation and pragmatic guidance. As a result, the core recipes in his book provide sufficient detail that a new cook can garner everything they need to craft a solid paper themselves.

We particularly like these tables and figures (from among more than 50):

Self-Education Reading List for Medical Researchers, a solid starting inventory for what should be on the bookshelves of academic investigators and teachers
Reviewers’ most common criticisms of manuscripts
Editors’ most common criticisms of manuscripts
How to avoid annoying a reviewer/an editor
Elements of a good title
Sentence beginnings to avoid/use sparingly
Suggestions for resubmitting
How a paper fills a niche in the literature
Manuscript section that is most often responsible for rejection
Frequency of presentation problems
Internal peer review form

And dozens of additional pointers.

If you are refining your writing or research, or teaching others to do so, you won’t go wrong to have a copy of this book to supplement conventional academic writing guides. Don’t be surprised if it becomes the most referenced one on the shelf.

Conflict of interest: Dr. Byrne is faculty at Vanderbilt, the operational home of Edge for Scholars. So far he doesn’t give us any of the royalties. We can always hope – the Keurig needs supplies.