Writing Papers for Medical / Public Health Journals

There are many resources on how to write a public health or medical paper:

• Stanford Scientific Writing Class
• The Pathway to Publishing: A Guide to Quantitative Writing in the Health Sciences
• Preparing Manuscripts for Submission to Medical Journals: The Paper Trail
• Writing in Boxes for Scientific Journals

I wrote this outline for writing medical papers when I was a graduate student instructor for Stanford Medicine's Outcomes Analysis class. It demostrates one way to structure a paper for the medical literature:

• Introduction
• General context about your research question
• Describe specific literature related to your research question
• Describe knowledge gap
• What you do (state research question, specific objectives/hypotheses)
• How this work fills the knowledge gap/improves science in this area
• Methods: Data and Statistical Analysis
• Overview of your approach
• Description of all data sources (each source gets its own sub section)
• Eligibility criteria to be included in the input data set (sampling, etc)
• Clearly state measurement of outcomes, exposures, diagnostic criteria
• If applicable, state how you linked data sets or excluded any data
• Statistical Analysis
• Describe all statistical methods, with brief reasoning and equations
• Describe assumptions needed for causal inference/how your method addresses potential sources of bias if applicable
• Describe any methods used to analyze subgroups, interactions, sensitivity, etc.
• Results
• Descriptive summaries [Table 1 reports summary characteristics of data]
• Main results, followed by subgroup/sensitivity [with confidence intervals]
• Do not interpret findings in this section, clearly report results from your methods/hypothesis tests.
• Discussion
• 2-3 Main findings with reference to specific objectives from intro
• Interpretation of results
• Limitations
• Generalizability/conclusions
• Future work (if appropriate)