Each year, in an attempt to stimulate journalism students' interest in medical writing, CMAJ sponsors the Amy Chouinard Memorial Essay Prize. The $750 award is in memory of Amy Chouinard, a longtime and valued contributor to CMAJ and the Canadian Journal of Surgery. Students from any recognized journalism program at a Canadian college or university are eligible to enter, and the deadline for 19...

The case report, which has a long history in medicine, has seen its fortune wax and wane with time. We discuss the challenges facing the continued survival of the case report, including the inability of journals to cope with the increased load and increased cost of publication, ethical issues, the impact factor and the rise of evidence-based medicine. We highlight the important role that the ca...

Competitive behavior has often been presented as the ultimate engine of economic, technological, and scientific progress. Since all such progress is likely to imply some measure of social benefit, competition has been widely praised in modern western culture. However, competition can have very negative effects on social wellbeing. An early example is known as the "tragedy of the commons." The c...

Authors of articles published in medical journals are often busy researchers who cannot afford time devoted to writing. Though they are experts in their own therapeutic area, more often than not, researchers find it difficult to actually write and publish their research. Professional medical writers with their expertise in writing clear, concise, comprehensible, and coherent content are often a...

Health educators can play a critical role in bringing together the partners and resources to successfully make videos using principles of community-based participatory research (CBPR). This article is a "how-to" guide for making videos using community-based participatory research principles. The authors describe video-making and CBPR, then outline six steps on how to make a video using principl...

3-D microstructural analysis of 30 porphyroblastic samples from the Variscan orogen in NW-Iberia has revealed four sets of inclusion trails with distinctive geographic trends and relative timing. The chronological and orientational consistency of these microstructures provides a reference frame for the correlation of macroscopic structural successions. The two younger inclusion trail sets corre...

Giving an excellent presentation is critical for the success of many people, including leaders, managers, team members, business people, those in nonprofit societies, coaches, and educators. The audience may vary from a few people to thousands of people, but many of the principles are the same. This is the first in a multipart article giving some advice on the writing, rehearsal, and delivery o...