Category
Covering medical studies
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Here’s how one journalist discovered the rush to robotic surgery was ahead of the evidence
What does it take to write an award-winning article? For Richard Mark Kirkner, the process involved finding the right idea,…
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Assessing a journal’s quality can help assess a study’s newsworthiness
Perhaps you stumble onto an intriguing study that you haven’t seen covered and want to report on it. Or you…
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Coverage of Zika continues as researchers, reporters learn more
Zika has been in the news since the beginning of the year in the United States, but health officials and journalists…
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Story about reconstructive surgery for soldiers was no ‘quick hit’
With thousands of soldiers having served in Iraq and Afghanistan, our country will be grappling with the short-term and long-term…
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Using editorials, letters to help make sense of contradictory data
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a bombshell alcohol recommendation to women on Feb. 2 that led to…
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Have you earned your PubMed black belt?
It’s just about impossible to report on medical research without becoming intimately familiar with PubMed. But just because a reporter…
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Facts vs. opinions: Beware of false balance in your reporting
It is a journalist’s job to objectively and fairly represent the various perspectives on an issue, and it’s a journalist’s…
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Trade group’s dispute with FDA highlights need to watch for report revisions
The nation’s clinical laboratories have pushed back hard against a proposal by U.S. Food and Drug Administration in October 2014…
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Obesity research: What to know and making sense of studies
Calling obesity an “epidemic” is almost a cliche in health reporting, but there is no question that obesity is linked…
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Retraction Watch offers some transparency about transparency
In the years since its inception, Retraction Watch has documented hundreds of troubled scientific papers that were eventually retracted, as…