A study of some international medical journals aiming to elicit stylistic guidelines for writing publishable papers.

Objective: To provide some indications and guidelines on style and presentation for those aiming to publish in selected international journals.
Setting: University library in the Istituto di Clinica Chirurgica, Bari University Hospital.
Methods: A single topic, portal hypertension, was chosen to ensure a certain homogenity for the purposes of comparison, and the three most recent articles on this topic were identified in six international journals (three published in England and three in the USA; three in the medical and three in the surgical field) and studied from the points of view of style and presentation.
Results: Strong similarities were found among the 18 selected articles. In the interests of brevity, all were characterized by compact statements, qualified by lists of examples, and strings of adjectival nouns. In all, the Introduction and Conclusions sections were relatively short, the main body of the article being reserved to the Patients and Methods, Results and Discussion/Comments sections. Apart from very slight spelling or grammar differences characterizing English or American usage, all the articles could, with slight alterations in format in some cases, equally well have been published in any other of the journals studied.
Conclusions: Brevity, even at the expense of elegance, and a straightforward, unambiguous, to some extent standardized, approach to the presentation of a scientific study, are essentials for the acceptance of an article for publication in the selected temational journals.