Should I become a Medical Editor?

If MedComms is a bit of a hidden industry, then medical editing is a hidden role within MedComms.

Medical writing gets all of the attention, but without Medical Editors, Medical Writers would really struggle.

Everyone needs an editor, and this is a different skill from the scientific review that a scientific director or team leader would do on a piece of content.

I mean, yes, there are some areas of overlap and sometimes the distinction might be a bit blurry between what would be checked by an editor versus a scientific reviewer, but it is still a distinct and crucial role within MedComms.

I’m Eleanor Steele and I’m the MedComms Mentor.

Over my last couple of videos, I’ve been looking at the skills, experience, and mindset that you need to be a Medical Writer or to be in client services in MedComms.

Today I’m focusing on Medical Editors, considering six key questions to ask yourself if you are thinking about becoming a Medical Editor, and I’ll also touch on some of the things that Medical Editors do. It’s not all just checking for typos.

So, how can you tell if medical editing would be the right career for you?

1. Do you have an eagle eye?

It’s not exactly original to say that you need an eagle eye to be a good editor, but it’s a cliche because it’s true.

You have to have excellent attention to detail.

Now, that’s true of any kind of editor, but in MedComms there’s an extra layer. As I mentioned in my video about medical writing, accuracy is crucial in MedComms because any errors could have significant consequences for patients’ lives.

MedComms agencies have strict quality control processes to ensure that all content is accurate and evidence-based, and the Medical Editors are crucial to this.

So firstly, this means that Medical Editors need excellent language skills to copy-edit the text, making sure that all the content is as clear as possible, and any edits that are needed enhance understanding without changing the meaning of the text.

Part of this is considering the target audience and making sure that the content isn’t just accurate and well-written, it’s also appropriate for that audience. Now, in MedComms, most of our content is aimed at healthcare professional audiences. But even within that, there’s a lot of variety.

Medical Editors also have to ensure that the content is appropriate for the format it will be released in – for example, having a very detailed paragraph exploring the clinical significance of a particular piece of data is appropriate for a discussion section of a manuscript, but not appropriate for a slide deck summarising that paper. The two types of content have very different requirements in terms of how information is presented.

Medical Editors will also look at consistency. This includes consistent language – so is it UK or US English? Are there any terms or phrases that should be used consistently for strategic reasons? – but also formatting consistency.

These are the tiny details that we generally don’t notice if they’re right, but if they’re wrong they can really distract the audience and in a worst case scenario, could make the content confusing or even misleading.

It’s the simple things like how the references are cited, how abbreviations are defined, and where you find those pieces of information, which colours are used, which fonts or text sizes for different types of content, how footnotes are formatted.

If these little details are consistent, it makes the content easy to follow and the meaning is clear. It helps our audiences sail through the piece of content with a sense of cognitive ease.

Medical Editors are a crucial part of this consistency process because they usually work across multiple projects within an account or even every single project for that account. They may be the only person who sees every single piece of content, and so they take responsibility for macro and micro consistency.

2. Do you have a science background?

Obviously, the content that we work on in MedComms is, well, medical, and it can be pretty complex.

To be an effective editor, it really helps if you understand the content that you’re working on.

I’ve got some personal experience with this – my brother did a PhD in Geology and he asked me to edit his thesis. I thought, ‘Yep, I’m a Medical Writer. I can cope with complicated science, bring it on!’

But it turns out Geology is pretty different from Neuroscience, which is what my degree was in, and I think my input was helpful, but I remember reading through parts of it and wondering whether some of the words he used were weird typos or just geological terms that I had never come across before.

To be fair, it was a bit of both, but not having the underlying familiarity with the terminology and the conventions of how things are described in that field meant that I was at a disadvantage.

Now, if we come back to MedComms, not all Medical Editors have a science degree, but it is useful. I’ve known fantastic editors who didn’t have science degrees, but I do think it puts them at a bit of a disadvantage.

Without a science degree, you have to put in quite a lot of extra effort to get your head around the data and the terminology. In particular, this could be challenging when you are working on data checks.

So this is a critical part of the quality control process, making sure that every data point in a piece of content has been checked against the source material, so that’s everything in the text, figures and tables – they all have to be checked to ensure they are accurate and supported by appropriate references.

Different agencies have different processes, but it’s very likely that anyone acting as a Medical Editor will be involved in data-checking to some extent.

3. Do you like working on visual content?

MedComms involves a huge range of different types of project.

Some MedComms projects are long-form prose, like articles for publication in peer-reviewed journals, but many others are very visual. So posters for medical conferences, slides for meetings, educational web content, animations showing the mechanism of action of drugs.

Editors often work very closely with Design teams on this kind of visual content.

At the simplest end, this would be something like redrawing the figures for a manuscript from the source material, like a clinical study report or another published reference. The editor will check that the content has been redrawn accurately, and also following all of the style guidelines for the new format.

Editors also have to copy-check projects that are written in one form, and then converted into another format by Design or Digital colleagues.

This often happens with visual projects. It’s like how a film will often start off with a storyboard, sketching out the bones of the content, and then a script, and filming, and editing the video and post-production.

Each iteration will get closer to the finished product, but you don’t want to start off in a really expensive and time-consuming format to begin with.

So, when we are working on something like a poster for a conference, the text and initial figures and tables will be drafted in Word or PowerPoint, and we’ll get this document reviewed by everyone involved because it’s quick, easy, and relatively cheap to make updates in this format.

Once the content is final, the editor will work with the design team to convert it into the final format, again, checking all the details are transferred across accurately paying close attention to things like symbols, or text that is superscript or subscript, because these things often go wonky in that conversion process.

They will also ensure that all the formatting is correct, like the colours and fonts, text sizes, references, and footnotes, the alignments and spacing.

That’s a relatively simple job on a project like a poster, but for a digital project, there might be a lot more moving parts, including functionality to test – like if it’s an educational website with interactive questions, what happens when someone clicks on the wrong answer or even the right answer?

Someone needs to check every single variable and have the understanding to know when it’s right and when it needs to be updated, and that is often the editor.

4. Are you a self-starter?

Within MedComms agencies there are usually multiple teams, each working on specific accounts or sometimes sets of accounts.

Medical Editors are part of these teams, but they often work alone, potentially spanning more accounts than other team members.

Think about it like this – the editor will only work on content at specific points during the development process, often at the first and final draft stages, but the writer will be working on it throughout, and the client services team will be coordinating and keeping track at all stages too.

Editing teams are also often smaller than writing or client services teams, and smaller agencies will only have one or two permanent editors and manage workload peaks by bringing in freelance support. Basically within an agency, Medical Writers work in packs, but editors are more of a lone wolf kind of role.

If you are the kind of person who can look across all the tasks you’re being asked to do and just get your head down and crack on with it, medical editing could be a really good fit for you.

Also, because editors work across such a breadth of projects, they may receive multiple briefs for projects due at the same time, and you have to be able to prioritise this workload effectively.

This becomes particularly challenging for something like a big set of abstracts to be submitted to the same congress. It’s best if one editor looks at the entire set to ensure consistency, but if they all have to be submitted on the same day and they’re all being worked on right up to the wire, that’s pretty tricky to manage.

Editors will sometimes need to negotiate timelines within their teams or let them know what level of editorial support is going to be feasible, if they’re going to fit everything in.

If you’re new to editing, there will be people in your agency to support you with this, but it means it’s helpful to be able to look at what’s being briefed and decide whether you are going to be able to manage it or if that won’t be feasible, flag it as early as possible so that a Plan B can be created.

And that brings me onto my next question.

5. Are you pragmatic?

MedComms does tend to attract perfectionists, and in some ways it might seem like ‘perfectionist’ should be on the job description for an editor. I mean, making sure there are no mistakes, that the content is as perfect as possible, is literally what an editor does, right?

The thing is, sometimes we don’t have the time or the budget for perfection. Everything in MedComms comes down to the budget. It’s the agency business model.

So the client service team, working with other functions, will map out every task that’s needed to develop a piece of content and how long the relevant people will have to perform that task.

For an edit, that will include working out which drafts will actually get an edit, and there’s often a standard calculation that’s used to work out how long the editor will get and therefore how much it will cost the client.

For example, the standard scope agreed with a particular client might be that for every slide deck, the editor will get 10 minutes per slide.

This is then multiplied up by the number of slides agreed in the scope and the cost per hour for that editor and a nice simple cost pops out at the end of the formula.

Now, some slides will take two seconds – a title slide with four words on it and has been created in the correct template?

Quick look, all good, boom. Onto the next one.

Some slides will take waaaay longer. A slide with 15 references, including some that are for websites with hyperlinks that you have to check to make sure they are still active? A complex figure with multiple builds to highlight different data points? That could take half an hour easily.

Generally, a project will even out so that it takes about the right amount of time. That’s why we use that kind of budget formula. But sometimes we’ll be faced with a project that could take a lot longer than we actually have.

Maybe it’s a slide deck that’s been cobbled together from multiple sources. Merging decks from different templates has meant that the formatting has gone wonky on some slides, the titles are sometimes title case and sometimes sentence case. Some of the references are cited numerically and some are alphabetical. The colours for a specific drug are not consistent throughout.

An editor would look at that mess and say ‘Oh my God, this is going to take me a week, and you want it back by the end of the day? No chance!’

But the thing is, it’s for an internal meeting and the client doesn’t care what it looks like. She just needs the information to be accurate and legible, and she needs it ready for her meeting first thing tomorrow with the rest of the medical affairs team.

A good editor can edit a project to match the brief and the time available, taking into account what is needed and why.

This means being able to triage issues to identify what has to change, and what is good enough, and that means being able to swallow perfectionism. It’s just not needed here.

6. Can you cope under pressure?

Editing is the kind of task that it’s best to do when you’ve got a clear head, you’re not tired or stressed, you can really focus and you don’t have people badgering you and asking if you’re done every five minutes.

Unfortunately, editing is often one of the last steps in the project development process, and if there have been cumulative delays along the way, it can mean that things get to you just before the deadline.

That might mean you get the abstract just before it has to be submitted, or the document that needs to go out on review by the end of the week at 4:30 on a Friday. Not ideal.

We really do try to avoid this. The client services team will plot out a schedule that tries to ensure that everyone will have the time they need to do a thorough job, and that deadlines are not a mad scramble to the finish. But even the best laid plans come a cropper occasionally.

So anyone thinking that becoming a Medical Editor could be right for them, needs to have the ability to ignore the ticking clock and do what’s necessary to polish a project in the time available.

That includes being pragmatic enough to focus on the elements that are absolutely critical to check and correct if there isn’t enough time available to do everything, but also being able to function in that high pressure, deadline driven environment.

Download the PDF Summary

So should you become a Medical Editor?

1. If you have an eagle eye for all of those editorial and formatting details
2. You have a scientific background, or at least an interest in science and healthcare so that it won’t be a slog editing this kind of content
3. You like working on visual content as well as text
4. You are a self-starter who can prioritise your work and just get the job done, but also negotiate timelines when necessary
5. You’re pragmatic enough to understand when perfection isn’t possible and good enough is, well, good enough
6. You can cope under the pressure of deadlines

…then yes, I think becoming a Medical Editor could be a fantastic career choice for you.

You can download a summary of all of the things I’ve discussed here from a link in the video description below, and this would be a really handy resource if you are thinking about applying for jobs as a Medical Editor or if you’re preparing for job interviews.

If you’ve found this video helpful, I’d be really grateful if you could hit the like button and maybe share it with a friend.

And do let me know in the comments if you have any questions or if you have any suggestions for other topics I could cover in future videos.