Professional medical writing support increases the impact of articles reporting randomized controlled trials

Abstract

BACKGROUND• Professional medical writing support is associated with more complete reporting of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and a higher quality of written English than articles without this support.

Professional medical writing support and the quality, ethics and timeliness of clinical trial reporting: a systematic review

“…Each of these studies, using a different statistical approach to assess adherence, showed that PMWS was associated with increased adherence to CONSORT guidelines (Table 2). Articles developed with PMWS were significantly more likely to report completely at least 50% of the assessed CONSORT items ( p < 0.05) [15, 18] and to comply with more CONSORT items than articles without PMWS ( p < 0.05) [16]. Similarly, articles with 80–100% compliance with CONSORT items were significantly more likely to have been developed with PMWS than those with less than 80% compliance ( p < 0.0001) [20].…”

“…Two studies which represented different analyses of the same group of articles looked at other markers of quality in reporting (Table 2) [15, 18]. In these studies, PMWS was positively associated with various measures of reporting quality, including a higher standard of written English ( p < 0.01) [15, 18], higher likelihood of publication in a journal with an impact factor ( p = 0.001) [18], and higher mean impact factor of the journal accepting the article ( p < 0.001) [18]. However, there was no association between PMWS and article-level measures of impact, such as mean number of citations per year ( p = 0.11), mean number of article views per year ( p = 0.84) and Altmetric score ( p = 0.55) (Table 2) [18].…”

“…In these studies, PMWS was positively associated with various measures of reporting quality, including a higher standard of written English ( p < 0.01) [15, 18], higher likelihood of publication in a journal with an impact factor ( p = 0.001) [18], and higher mean impact factor of the journal accepting the article ( p < 0.001) [18]. However, there was no association between PMWS and article-level measures of impact, such as mean number of citations per year ( p = 0.11), mean number of article views per year ( p = 0.84) and Altmetric score ( p = 0.55) (Table 2) [18]. Of the identified studies, one examined the relationship between outcome reporting and PMWS using data from the publicly available Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine Outcome Monitoring Project (COMPare) [23].…”

“…Other outcomes of interest assessed in this review were assigned independently of the investigators involved in each of the articles analysed in each included study (e.g. standard of written English—assessed during peer review of analysed articles [18]). As such, in this systematic review, we have been successful in analysing a range of outcomes assessed in observational (‘real-world’) studies in a standardized manner that minimizes publication bias.…”

Insights of Healthcare Professionals into Medical Writing Support at a Tertiary Care Hospital in Saudi Arabia

“…The high level of acceptance of medical writing services of our respondents would allude to the benefits our cohort obtained from PMWS for a written manuscript. However, it is worth pointing out that there is a study that suggested that the use of professional writers did not improve the impact of the published article in terms of annual citations, article views, and altimetric score and did not show any increased adherence to CONSORT-A [ 33 , 34 ]. However, it must be noted that 12.3% of our respondents deemed it unethical to use PMWS.…”