Medical Writing Agencies Editing and Proofreading Services

A manuscript is submitted with four named authors. It was drafted by a professional writer working from an outline agreed at a sponsor meeting, revised through six rounds, and approved by a publications committee. All of that is entirely legitimate and none of it is visible on the paper unless somebody writes it down — and whether it is written down is the whole difference between medical writing and ghostwriting.

We edit what medical writing agencies and publications teams produce — manuscripts and their acknowledgement and contributorship statements, author agreements and contribution records, publication plans and steering documents, congress abstracts and posters, plain language summaries, disclosure and funding statements, writing support declarations, journal correspondence and reviewer responses, publication policy and standard operating procedures, and author training material on contributorship. Our editors work on the statements that describe how a paper was made.

The authorship, contributorship and writing support declaration is where this profession is either transparent or vulnerable, and its failure is vagueness that reads as concealment. "Editorial assistance was provided" describes anything from proofreading to drafting the entire paper. We work through these so the writing support statement names what was actually done — outline, first draft, revisions, figure preparation, submission — with who did it, at which organisation, and who funded it, since every one of those facts is checkable and their absence is the thing that attracts attention; so authorship is recorded against defined criteria with each author's actual contribution, because a contributorship statement in which all four authors did everything is not believed by any editor; so the sponsor's role is stated across design, conduct, analysis, drafting and the decision to submit, given that these are separable and readers assume the worst when they are aggregated; so anyone who contributed substantially but does not meet authorship criteria is acknowledged with their permission and their role; so the data access statement says who actually had access to the raw data, as this is the question that follows every industry-sponsored paper; and so the funding statement distinguishes the study's funding from the publication's. Papers documented this way go through peer review on their science.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including manuscripts, publication plans and sponsor material. We are editors rather than publication ethics or regulatory advisers, and we offer no view on authorship decisions, disclosures or compliance. What we can do is make the record of how a paper was made complete enough to be unremarkable.