Working with authors as their writer
A writer works for the authors whose document it is. Those authors may expect to buy something other than what the writer can offer. The relationship with an author can be built deliberately, with an unclear passage queried rather than guessed at, and inside an in-house team the work with authors runs under conditions of its own.
Know what the authors think they are buying
In 2012 a survey of the value of professional medical writers went to 260 academics and clinicians, all of them current or former clients of the communications agency the survey's authors worked for, and 76 responded. Most respondents, 63 of 75, valued the assistance of medical writers. The largest group, 61 of 76, found writers useful for editing for grammar, spelling and journal style, including referencing, but only 9 respondents, 12%, valued a medical writer's scientific expertise. These findings matched the experience of one in-house science editor working with professors and physicians, for whom the word science in their job title sometimes felt superfluous.
Of the 13 people who answered the survey's open question, one thought the medical writer should be the first author. Another thought writers could be authors depending on their contribution, while acknowledging that this is not really their role.
Scientific writing is a critical component of a scientist's career, whether in publishing a manuscript, writing a report, creating a presentation or documenting a procedure. Yet many scientists find getting the document started time-consuming and often daunting, for reasons that include lack of confidence in their writing ability, inexperience with the writing process and unfamiliar document management tools. Scientific writers are often consulted to review, edit and proofread a final draft, but an experienced writer has a lot more to offer even before the document is written, to make the writing process easier, and may be able to provide document management services that support the scientific author.
Build the relationship with the author deliberately
A publication writer builds and maintains a collaborative relationship with the author, clarifies any ambiguous parts of the article and develops a feedback mechanism with the author. Where the authors cannot meet to discuss the unclear parts immediately, the writer writes polite queries about them for the authors to address. The aim is a better author–editor relationship and a better appraisal of the article, and the practice also improves the writer's ability to clarify issues, to extract, synthesise and summarise the important points of a discussion, and to build and strengthen the working relationship with the author.
One in-house medical writer in medical devices preferred to work back and forth with the author rather than receive a paper, write or edit the whole of it and send it back. He rewrote and rearranged the methods and results of a paper so that they would be, he hoped, as clear and easy to follow as a recipe, then sent them back to the author for comment before drafting the introduction and discussion. He called this a total quality approach. Working back and forth is possible with some authors and not with others, and where it is not, the paper will probably have an avalanche of comments. He hoped the author would answer soon, ideally the next day, so that he could stay in the mental space of the paper. He and that author had a good working relationship on first-name terms, although they were unlikely ever to meet.
He handled an unclear passage with a written query. Where he was not sure of an author's intended meaning, he left a comment beginning with something like "does this mean the same as…" followed by what he thought it meant. Where he was not sure at all, he highlighted the passage and moved on, then checked the highlighted parts with an officemate who had a doctorate in molecular biology. He sent the statistical language to a statistician to check. A lead author who invited him to make direct contact with any questions struck him as someone who would be easy to work with.
That lead author replied that there had always been a correct option, in content, among his suggestions, and he found it a really nice email to get.
Work with authors from inside an in-house team
In his in-house team, papers were supposed to be distributed top-down, but while the department head and the medical writing team leader were away, the two medical writers distributed work between themselves as seemed reasonable, which worked well. One paper reached him outside that process, from a co-author in research and development who knew him from a German class, asking him to check the English because the journal had asked for it to be checked by a native speaker. On one day, four of his six ongoing papers were with authors or contact people for quality control or to resolve ambiguous or contradictory information.
Contact with authors could also run through an intermediary. He had sent a presentation he made for some authors on their data to the company's representative, the contact person between him at headquarters and the surgeons at the clinics, and the questions that came back struck him as the result of only a cursory reading. He drafted a testy email to the contact person and toned it down, though it stayed testy, before sending it, content to be thought difficult if it made the authors think about their own work before they sent questions.
When research and development took a case-study paper off his hands, he judged it better that way, because they would know exactly what the paper was about without the background research he would have had to do. He emailed them the list of journals he had recommended to the author and confirmed that he was available to proof the English of the manuscript when they were done.
He checked the status of a paper he had submitted on behalf of its authors on the journal's website himself, because if there had been a decision the authors might not have told him, and he had never worked with that author before. For the papers he had worked on but the authors submitted, he kept a list of titles and searched PubMed for them to see whether any had been published. A paper that went out without his involvement in submission joined that list. One paper he had worked on four years earlier and had not seen since had been published, and its publication seems to have come as rather a surprise. Another, a retroactive study, would probably never be published because of its study design. A third had languished with its authors for over a year over minor corrections. Seventeen papers he wrote, edited or proofread were published in the previous year and eleven so far in the current one, and some of them acknowledged him. One author he had worked closely with for over a year, through rejections from a series of journals, was close to an acceptance and was to send him the final version to proof.