I have recently published a paper, along with my colleagues at GAPP, addressing some of the myths surrounding medical writing.

As an aside, this was my last act as a GAPP member, and I have now stood down from the organisation. It was a privilege to be a founder member, and I am very proud of the work that GAPP has done, but now that I am no longer professionally involved in medical writing it seemed appropriate to move on.

Anyway, the paper addresses 3 myths surrounding the role of professional medical writers in preparing publications for the peer-reviewed medical literature:

• Myth No 1: Medical writers are ghostwriters
• Myth No 2: Ghostwriting is common
• Myth No 3: Researchers should not need medical writing support

(Spoiler alert: none of those 3 things is actually true.)

Unfortunately, the full paper is paywalled. Sorry about that. This wasn’t our first choice of journal: the article was originally written in response to an invitation to write the article from another journal, who then rejected it. And as GAPP has no funding, there was no budget to pay for open access publishing.

But luckily, the journal allows me to post the manuscript as submitted (but not the nice neat typeset version) on my own website.

So here it is. Happy reading.