Biomedical Communication: Selected AMWA Workshops 101 Organizing the Biomedical Paper

The preparation of a scientific paper has less to do with literary skill than with organization (Lang, 1987). Authors of biomedical manuscripts want to or-ganize each manuscript so that readers will be able to follow a sequence of events and understand the message. The editor (or the peer reviewer) of a bio-medical manuscript reads it to discern (among other things) whether the author has organized the manu-script successfully and, if not, whether a specific rearrangement might make the manuscript more understandable to readers. Readers of a biomedical paper are usually physicians or scientists; they read a paper because they are interested in the message. If a paper is difficult to follow, such readers probably will not be interested in trying to understand it. I