Stephen Luby is a medical epidemiologist who has worked for over 25 years conducting
public health research in low-income countries. This effort has included
developing the scientific writing skills of early career researchers whom he collaborated
with. This guide grew out of his review of dozens of draft manuscripts from
novice scientists in Pakistan in the mid-1990s. To avoid writing the same critique
into multiple manuscripts, he developed a short list of "most common errors" with
explanations of how they should be addressed. This allowed him to refer to manuscript
errors more quickly by number, and allowed writers to see a more complete
description of the problem than might be typed out when he recognized a familiar
error in a new manuscript.
Over the years, these "most common errors" multiplied. While working in
Bangladesh, Stephen began collaborating with Dorothy Southern, who edited and
organized this rather unwieldy list and integrated explanations and examples from a
number of different sources. As Dorothy and Stephen recognized new errors, they
incorporated them into the guide. Dorothy also worked to broaden the document to
describe the mentor-orientated approach to scientific writing that they promoted in
the Centre for Communicable Diseases at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal
Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr, b).
Neither of us is now living in Bangladesh, but we both remain involved teaching
scientific writing to early career scientists, especially those working in low- and
middle-income countries. We have chosen to publish this as an open access guide so
that it can be downloaded at no charge by scientists working in low-resource
settings.
The Pathway to Publishing: A Guide to Quantitative Writing in the Health
Sciences focuses on the unique format and data presentation of quantitative studies
in the health sciences. It aims to support and encourage scientists who are actively
engaged in quantitative research to write effectively, and so increase the sharing of
important scientific results. Since this guide grew out of training public health scientists
in Pakistan and Bangladesh, many of the examples are from this context,
though the principles apply broadly to clear scientific writing.
