An author’s guide to mastering academic writing skills: Discussion of a medical manuscript

Abstract

Skilled scientific or academic writing is of great importance to research communication and journal publication ultimately. The four fundamental sections of a scholarly manuscript are introduction, methods, results and discussion. The discussion serves to interpret and analyze the study results in view of the existing body of evidence. Moreover, it serves to transform the usually rigid numerical statistical data of the results section into practical and clinically utilizable information. A well-formulated discussion can provide readers with informed decisions on the validity of the results and their exact generalizability to the broader community. It can also isolate shortcomings of the existing literature. Despite the extensive growth in biomedical publications lately, little attention has been paid to the importance of medical writing in general and to the discussion section of a medical manuscript in specific. This applies to curricular education and medical literature. The implications of well-executed studies with important findings can go unnoticed if authors are less skilled at writing a comprehensive discussion and conclusion among other manuscript sections. I intended to convey the experience I have accumulated in authoring and peer-reviewing for leading society journals and supervising in-house academic theses and dissertations. The objective of this article was to help authors present and communicate their research findings methodically, efficiently and impartially. Orthopedic research was taken as a practical example.