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Tip sheetsJournalists and experts have written about covering medical studies and presented discussions on the topic at AHCJ conferences and workshops. This is a collection of the most useful and relevant tips. Click the title of the tip sheet that interests you and you will be asked to login because these are available exclusively to AHCJ members. Featured tip sheetsWhy you should use more nurses as sources and tools to get you started March 2022 How to find the right outside expert with the relevant expertise for new study March 2021 Prepare yourself before covering serology testing and other COVID-19 immunity issues May 2020 To begin this quick primer, here are some basic concepts to understand before interviewing experts in immunity and epidemiology. Covering concussion research and screening and diagnostic testing for concussions July 2020 Tips on covering mental health during the pandemic June 2020 Tips on covering preprints about coronavirus research April 2020 Look for additional tip sheets based on subject:
Animal studies5 tips for covering studies done in animals
The tip sheets are broken into two parts because they’re pretty detailed — the decision about whether to cover an animal study is rife with nuance and competing priorities, so you need to think carefully about why you want to cover it, who your audience is and what it will add to general public knowledge about animal research and the particular subjects the study relates to. Drug costsFinding the costs of drugs and treatments April 2012 Journal/information accessAHCJ announces greatly discounted LexisNexis access October 2017 LexisNexis is a vital resource for all types of journalists and writers, but it's particularly valuable for those covering health care in that it contains some 250 industry publications, including the American Journal of Law & Medicine, The American Journal of Surgery, The Lancet, Biotech Business, Modern Healthcare and Occupational Health. Assessing a journal's quality can help assess a study's newsworthiness  February 2016 Often some of the most interesting findings can come from a smaller journal, especially in an emerging area of science that isn’t widely studied or accepted, yet remains scientifically sound. You want to watch out for predatory journals, those that charge scientists to publish their work without adequate quality controls, and those that are just low in quality or affiliated with an advocacy organization. So, how do you vet a journal before moving forward on reporting a study published in it? Here are some guidelines on performing due diligence on the journal’s quality. Have you earned your PubMed black belt?  January 2016 At her Absolutely Maybe blog (hosted at science- and medicine-centric PLOS Blogs) Hilda Bastian explains 9 PubMed Ninja Skills that will help reporters, researchers and anyone else get the most out of the site. About half of her suggestions require an account at PubMed, but these are free and quick to set up. She opens with some great links to the sources that PubMed draws from and then moves into expert searching skills, such as using filters, quotation marks and Boolean operators. How to access health journals and news services Are you making full use of your AHCJ member benefits? Independent journalist Maia Szalavitz explains how to get free access to resources including UpToDate.com and The Cochrane Library. Using the Drug Industry Document Archive for your reporting The Drug Industry Document Archive is a publically accessible website hosted by the University of California, San Francisco Library and Center for Knowledge Management that contains previously secret documents from major drug companies such as Merck, Pfizer and Abbott Labs. The documents are fully searchable and are accompanied by indexing information (metadata). Librarian Kim Klausner provided a tip sheet for AHCJ members about what can be found in the archives, how to use them and a collection of articles based on information found in the archives. Social media and medical studiesUsing social media to find real people for your story
May 2013 In this helpful tip sheet, Liz Szabo, an award-winning medical reporter for USA Today passes on some of her best tricks for using social media to cultivate sources. Resources and strategies for reportersWhy you should use more nurses as sources and tools to get you started March 2022 Covering concussion research and screening and diagnostic testing for concussions July 2020 Tips on covering mental health during the pandemic June 2020 Tips on finding and vetting experts during a disease outbreak March 2020 Begin mastering medical studies June 2019 Implementing the ‘10 criteria’ in your medical research reporting
June 2019 He discusses how to report on costs, outcomes, harms, recognizing bias, disease mongering and more. Some basic questions to ask presenters and attendees at a medical conference January 2019 Whether you use these exact questions, tweak them or develop your own, keep in mind that most of the time, what you primarily need is the clinical significance of the findings or, if there is no immediate clinical significance, what makes the findings important or surprising. Here are some questions to get you started. Conference coverage 101: Preparing to report on a medical research conference October 2018 But the experience can be overwhelming to those just starting or who have only attended a couple conferences. Tara Haelle has some pointers that focus on what you can do in the weeks before a conference to make the on-site experience easier and less hectic. November 2017 LGBT coverage – Are you gay? October 2017 Watch for these four red flags when reporting on medical studies January 2017 This tip sheet is the first in a series pointing out red flags that journalists should watch for in the studies they cover. Seeing one in a study doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be covered. In fact, sometimes a study with a lot of red flags is worth covering if it has strong news value but runs the risk of being misinterpreted in other articles. In that case, covering it may present an opportunity to ensure an accurate representation of the study, its limitations and implications compared with other coverage that may or may not cover it so judiciously. The Beginner’s Guide to Medical Research Reporting from Sharon Begley at the Open Notebook February 2016 Begley points out this sage reminder: “Somehow, medical writers forget (or never learn) that they are supposed to be journalists, not cheerleaders, and that to serve their readers or listeners they need to bring as much scrutiny, skepticism, and critical thinking to their field as the politics reporter brings to a candidate’s tax plan. And our first chance to do that is by choosing not to cover something.” Begley covers the unreliability of animal studies in terms of clinical relevance for humans, the pitfalls of covering studies that find associations (that may or may not imply causation), the way statistical significance can be manipulated with p-hacking and the constant need to remain skeptical in assessing research findings. If you’re just starting to get your feet wet in covering medical studies and are feeling a bit overwhelmed, Begley’s piece is a great place to start. Hilda Bastian, editor for clinical effectiveness resources for PubMed Health, offers a quick tour of PubMed and then gives her top nine habits and shortcuts for using the site. As she points out, there is so much information available from the resource that the most critical skill is how to avoid being swamped with things that don’t help. She covers how to refine your searches using filters, narrowing your searches, uisng Boolean operators, looking at articles similar to what you're searching for, finding specific citations, journals or authors and much more. What reporters can do to work more effectively with PIOs
December 2015 A couple years ago, I ran a guest post by Lauren Rugani – a PIO at the National Academy of Sciences – on nine things that drive PIOs nuts. Here I revisit the subject, reiterating some of Rugani’s posts but expanding on them too. Tips for reporters dealing with press offices
December 2015 None of these parts of the ecosystem really can get along without the others in our complex sound-bite driven part of the world. Yet the relationship between institutional press officers and the reporters who cover their scientists and research findings can sometimes become strained, partly because of changes in the university research occurs in recent years. Advice on communicating the problems with cancer overdiagnosis
November 2015 Reporting on drugs, devices and medical technologies Sometimes it helps to start with the very basics for those who have not reported on medical research before. The Commonwealth Fund has put together a thorough and accessible tip sheet on what to consider in reporting on drugs, devices and medical technologies for the beginner in this area. The seven areas they cover will already be familiar to those who have reported on medical research, particularly involving drugs and devices, before, but the tip sheet offers a great place to start for those new to the experience and feeling overwhelmed. The seven areas they cover include the potential benefit of a therapy, the potential harms of it, possible conflicts of interest, the strength of the evidence for it, the biological history of the condition it treats, alternatives to the treatment and its costs Tips for covering scientific conferences
May 2015 Mark Taylor attended the annual Scientific Meeting of the GSA, which featured more than 500 presentations, symposia and poster sessions. He also has covered other scientific conferences in his two decades as health care journalist, and he shares hard-earned wisdom on successfully covering such massive events. His tips include how to prepare before the conference, who to talk to, some key items to bring and how to plan out your coverage. Are you covering a fakethrough?
February 2014 Here, Jonathan Latham, Ph.D., the executive director of the Bioscience Resource Project, asks whether discoveries like that are breakthroughs or "fakethroughs" – scientific advances that will never progress to new treatments or beneficial products. He also talks about his brand of investigative science journalism and why reporting on new discoveries should probably be more muted. Getting past gatekeepers to cover research requires strategy October 2013 But change is slow. And your deadlines won't wait. What can you do today for a story that's due tomorrow? Brenda Goodman, AHCJ's medical studies topic leader, offers a set of strategies that recently helped her through an impasse with the FDA.
Chapters deal with the hierarchy of evidence, putting types of research into context, scrutinizing the quality of evidence, phases of clinical trials, explaining risk, embargoes, pitfalls of news from scientific meetings, criteria for judging your story and more. The guide links to online resources throughout. Use of HealthNewsReview.org criteria to evaluate a medical research study Harold J. DeMonaco, M.S., is the director of Innovation Support at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. In a detailed presentation, he breaks down a medical study using the checklist of 10 criteria developed by HealthNewsReview.org. Tips to generate clinical research & public health news coverage Robert Logan, Ph.D., is a communications research scientist in the Office of Communications and Public Liason, at the National Library of Medicine in Washington, D.C. His 2012 conference presentation is an overview of the resources available through the NLM, including PubMed, as well as the fellowship program available through the AHCJ and the NLM. Scientific languageNovember 2017 English, please? How to coax everyday language from your sources
April 2013 Freelance journalist Kathleen Doheny has come up with some strategies to coax more usable language out of sources. Find out what the "java approach" is, ways to suggest to your source that they use more reader-friendly words and how to coach them through the interview. Sexual assault and harassmentResources, tips for reporting on sexual assault and harassment At first, these stories might not seem related to medical research. However, it’s important for journalists to provide context and help readers understand the causes and impact of sexual assault and perhaps report on what evidence-based prevention and treatment looks like. Many stories may blend findings from medical studies with the stories of survivors themselves. Sex and genderCareful language important when reporting on transgender health issues November 2018 Tara Haelle provides a quick guide to terms you need to be familiar with, along with a link to a more extensive guide. Reporting on suicideResponsible reporting on suicide July 2016 When reporting on suicide, it’s important not only for reporters to have reliable data but also to be conscientious about the language and tone they use. Suicide is one of the unique topics in which the very reporting of it can influence how much more frequently it happens, so simply doing your job as a journalist has the unfortunate potential to influence the news itself in this scenario. These tips are a quick-and-dirty list from the World Health Organization’s guide, “Preventing Suicide: A Resource for Media Professionals.” Understanding researchHow to find the right outside expert with the relevant expertise for new study March 2021 Understanding 'effect size' to explain results of a study September 2019 There aren’t hard and fast rules for how much an effect size is needed to determine an intervention’s or exposure’s clinical significance, but there are very clearly defined ways to measure effect size. Reporting on organoids research August 2019 5 tips for covering studies done in animals
The tip sheets are broken into two parts because they’re pretty detailed — the decision about whether to cover an animal study is rife with nuance and competing priorities, so you need to think carefully about why you want to cover it, who your audience is and what it will add to general public knowledge about animal research and the particular subjects the study relates to. When reporting on surveillance programs, look for the denominator
Tara Haelle explains two basic types of surveillance and why understanding the difference is essential. Roadmap to evaluating think tank research October 2017 These helpful resources can reduce journalistic math anxiety September 2017 Understanding false positives, P-hacking and statistical power March 2017 What to keep in mind when reporting on 'brain death'
Understanding the nuances of this issue is vital since media reporting shapes public perceptions and so can impact more than 120,000 Americans on waiting lists for a replacement heart, liver or kidney. Nearly two out of three Americans over age 50 are on an organ donor waiting list, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, but because of insufficient organ donations sometimes caused by the confusion around brain death – they may not receive one in time. Author and researcher Alan Cassels explains some ways to improve reporting on this important issue, including definitions and potential sources. Resources from the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research
August 2016 Health journalists in particular have an obligation and opportunity to tease the threads of innovation, drug discovery, and regulatory environments to provide informed context and a powerful narrative. This is particularly critical when evaluating studies regarding older adults and other vulnerable groups. When reviewing methodology, these factors should be taken into consideration. Quick-and-dirty refresher for overall medical reporting July 2016 Tip sheet includes lessons about reporting on pregnancy exposures  December 2015 Olga Khazan learned a number of lessons when reporting “Into the Body of Another” at The Atlantic, which describes the mothers who were serving time in prison for using drugs during pregnancy and thereby “abusing” their then-unborn children. In a recent tip sheet, Khazan describes the challenges she encountered in reporting this story and tips for journalists who might report on similar topics. Reporting on side effects and drug studies
May 2014 His results were surprising and, as a result, he wrote a nuanced explanation of the study findings that makes some key points about the way side effects are reported in medical journals. Brenda Goodman shares them and how they are helpful for health reporters to keep in mind when covering the downsides of new drugs. Statistical errors even you can find: What you need to know about risks, rate, and ratios Presentations by Tom Lang, author of How to Report Statistics in Medicine: Annotated Guidelines for Authors, Editors and Reviewers, from the workshop "Medicine 101: Words, numbers and journals" at Health Journalism 2007. Understanding medical problems Presentation by Roy M. Pitkin, M.D., editor emeritus, Obstetrics & Gynecology, and professor emeritus, UCLA, from the workshop "Medicine 101: Words, numbers and journals" at Health Journalism 2007. Medicine 101: Words, numbers and journals Overview presentation from the workshop "Medicine 101: Words, numbers and journals" at Health Journalism 2007. Includes information about understanding and using medical language, what you need to know about risks, rates and ratios, statistical errors and understanding medical publications. Panelists:
Evaluating medical evidence for journalists Ivan Oransky, M.D., executive editor of Reuters Health and blogger at Retraction Watch and Embargo Watch, offers advice to journalists on reading studies and reseach, evaluating it and translating it for your readers, viewers and listeners in this presentation from Health Journalism 2012. Understanding studies, journal practices, how this stuff becomes news This slide presentation from Gary Schwitzer, of HealthNewsReview.org, discusses many of the common pitfalls of health reporting. AHCJ board member Ivan Oransky, M.D., is the executive editor of Reuters Health where he oversees coverage of some 500 medical studies annually. He also blogs about research at Embargo Watch and Retraction Watch. This presentation from the AHCJ’s 2010 annual meeting has some good tips for finding absolute risk in a study. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: ;What Retractions Tell Us About Scientific Transparency Ivan Oransky, M.D., vice president and global editorial director of MedPage Today and blogger at Retraction Watch and Embargo Watch, explains the different reasons studies are retracted, how long retractions take, what happens to citations of retracted papers and euphemisms used in describing retractions. All included examples can be found on Retraction Watch. This talk was given at Rutgers for the Omicron Chapter of Beta Phi Mu on Oct. 15, 2014. ViolenceResources to help cover the health care angle after a mass shooting November 2018 |
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June 2019
This slim guide will help journalists analyze and write about health and medical research studies. It offers advice on recognizing and reporting the problems, limitations and backstory of a study, as well as publication biases in medical journals and it includes 10 questions you should answer to produce a meaningful and appropriately skeptical report. We hope this guide, supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, will be a road map to help you do a better job of explaining research results for your audience.
May 2018
October 2016
