Book review: “Surgeons’ Guide to Medical Writing”

The new “Surgeons’ Guide to Medical Writing” (1) is a landmark publication on a crucial area of modern surgical practice.

This should be required reading for every surgeon.

Throughout a surgeon’s education, training and career, much emphasis has—correctly—been placed on attaining the most up-to-date medical knowledge and acquiring the most complete operative skillset. However, knowledge and skills only make up two of the foundations of complete mastery of surgery. The third, often neglected, pillar is academic proficiency.

To many young surgeons, ‘academics’ appears as a tedious chore: a boring, time-consuming grind to publish in order to advance one’s career (or perish trying). They often overlook that academic research forms the very basis for all of medicine and surgery today: evidence-based practice. That which sets modern surgery apart from shamanism is that its practice remains firmly grounded in real-world scientific results. These results were hard-earned by surgeons throughout the years through the scientific method: observations during daily practice; hypothesis forming on how practice might be improved; experimentation to test new methods; analysis of the data collected to reject or validate the hypothesis; implementation of findings into new practice; and so the cycle repeats. There is virtually no facet of established surgical practice today that has not come through such rigorous scrutiny to prove its safety and efficacy. Every surgeon owes their career and profession to the scientific efforts of those who have come before and did this hard work. And so, every young surgeon should also shoulder the duty to carry such work forward to benefit future patients. Their observations today should prompt questions on how to improve, and these in turn should drive research to discover whether ideas for improvement can actually work. However, finding out the ‘answer’ to each clinical question is still not sufficient. In order to truly benefit fellow surgeons around the world and their patients, a critical part of evidence-based practice is to effectively disseminate the findings around the world. The surgeons reading the reports must also be able to appreciate and assimilate the conclusions so that they can safely discern which may help to improve their own practice. In this way, academic proficiency needs to be recognized as a cornerstone of surgical practice—of similar importance to knowledge and skills.

It is regrettable, in this regard, that modern medical education and training fall short in building robust academic proficiency for surgeons. Medical knowledge is well taught at the university level, updated by medical journals and online sources, and bolstered by conferences and webinars. Operative skills can be enhanced by surgical workshops and courses, or even through the innumerable videos that can now be accessed through web-based platforms. However, for academic proficiency—how to read, write, and critique medical literature—opportunities for self-advancement are far more limited. It is not commonly taught as a subject in its own right to most medical students, and is only a minor component (if at all) of most surgical training syllabi. The European Society of Thoracic Surgeons (ESTS) has for years run a course on medical writing and communications, which I have proudly contributed to. However, this course (and only a few similar ones offered by other professional societies) can only be attended by a limited number of attendees each year. It is into this void that the “Surgeons’ Guide to Medical Writing” steps in. It immediately becomes the essential text for surgeons wishing to acquire academic skills that will impact on their careers and also their clinical practice.

To my knowledge, this is the first of such scope and focus to present all aspects of medical literature to surgeons. The list of chapters alone is already a comprehensive checklist of everything one must know about medical research and publication, including:

• Translating research into a scientific paper;
• Tips on refining every section of a paper;
• Behind-the-scenes processes of the reviewers, editors and publishers, and how that impacts on decisions for acceptance or rejection;
• How to read and review a scientific paper (which are two very different skills);
• Many other vital topics besides these.

It is safe to say, these skills covered in this should be as essential to every surgeon as how to suture a wound, or how to stop bleeding. Even if one were not pursuing a career as a professor at a university, the average surgeon needs to know enough about these topics in order to be able to effectively report one’s own work to peers, to understand the message being reported by other colleagues, and to be able to discern if and how findings from research may be used safely in daily practice. This ’s contents can fulfill that need.

The itself is very well written, with each section just concise enough to be readable and digestible without sacrificing detail. If, for example, one wishes to find out how to create tables or figures, or how to write a good abstract, then one can simply go straight to that section dealing with that topic. That section will give a very insightful guidance that can be read in minutes, yet provide practical advice on how to do it. This would therefore be a volume that should be kept within handy reach on the nearest shelf, ready to be taken out for reference whenever the need calls. It is also most helpful that the sections are each surprisingly well illustrated. The tables, figures and graphics are most helpful, and serve to summarize some key take-home messages in each section quite effectively.

I would strongly urge all younger surgeons to read this early in their careers. It would open their eyes about what goes on behind every surgical paper they read—from the perspectives of the authors, the reviewer, and the editors. This would not only help them to write better papers of their own, but also to understand the potential strengths and weaknesses in each paper published. Only by recognizing these through critical reading can the surgeon appreciate that not all that is published is a ‘gospel truth’. Any research and any paper will have nuances that need careful considerations. Those considerations can in turn lead to improvements in one’s own clinical practice, or inspire one to follow-up with even better research. Reading this and looking beyond the curtain into the inner workings of medical publications can potentially make any surgeon a finer connoisseur of the literature.

The other group of surgeons who need to have this are the mentors and trainers. This serves as a great resource for teaching. Using it as a training manual, senior surgeons can guide those under their tutelage to produce higher quality work. They can even supervise younger surgeons to become the next generation of journal reviewers and editors by using this to show what good and bad papers look like. Medical libraries in colleges and hospitals would do well to have this in their collections.

No is perfect though. I would have liked to see some examples of what makes a good and bad paper. This would have been educational for readers. I would also note that very critical elements of medical communications today lie beyond publishing in journals. For complete academic proficiency, sections should also exist for: preparing and delivering oral presentations at scientific conferences; designing scientific posters; the difference between writing a paper and a chapter; how to become a journal reviewer (and eventually an editor). These are all very common situations which surgeons today may encounter, and for which they find there are very few resources available to teach them. These omissions from this do not detract from the value that is already contained in its pages. Instead, it is hoped that there will be future editions of this in which these topics could be included.

I conclude this review by saying: this is a that I wish I had as a younger surgeon, and throughout my career. As a surgeon who has been an author, a reviewer, and an editor through most of my surgical life, there is little higher praise than that.

Acknowledgments

None.

Footnote

Provenance and Peer Review: This article was commissioned by the editorial office, Journal of Visualized Surgery. The article did not undergo external peer review.

Funding: None.

Conflicts of Interest: The author has completed the ICMJE uniform disclosure form (available at https://jovs.amegroups.com/article/view/10.21037/jovs-2026-0042/coif). A.D.L.S. serves as an Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Visualized Surgery from January 2025 to December 2026. The author has no other conflicts of interest to declare.

Ethical Statement: The author is accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

Open Access Statement: This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which permits the non-commercial replication and distribution of the article with the strict proviso that no changes or edits are made and the original work is properly cited (including links to both the formal publication through the relevant DOI and the license). See: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

References

1. Fingerhut A, Winter D, Wexner S. Surgeons’ Guide to Medical Writing. Hong Kong: AME Publishing Company; 2026.