Excellent editors need to be good authors too

Good Writers Need to be Good Listeners, Too

LCZ696: too good to be true?

This issue of the European Heart Journal contains a major statement by the PARADIGM-HF Investigators, who present an ‘putative placebo’ analysis for LCZ696, a new medicine that yielded a remarkable reduction in total mortality and heart failure events in patients with significant heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HF-REF). (NB: I serve as a consultant on Novartis’s cardiovascular–met...

Predatory publishing: what authors, reviewers, and editors need to know.

The expansion of the Internet and the increasing pressure to provide new scientific content to the public as quickly as possible have led to rapid changes in the publishing industry. Recently, new publishing models have arisen, such as open access (content available to readers at no charge), hybrid (some combination of print and online content delivery), and early online access to print journal...

How Good Does It Need to Be?

H igh-sensitivity cardiac troponin (hs-cTn) assays reportedly allow early definitive triage of patients with possible acute myocardial infarction (AMI). To be confident that one can implement such strategies safely, fastidious data are required. In their paper in this issue of the Journal, Mokhtari et al. (1) build on the protocol included in the European Society of Cardiology guidelines to rul...

Do Antibiotic Beads Need to be Removed?

Background: Polymethylmethacrylate antibiotic impregnated beads can be an effective treatment for chronicosteomyelitis or an adjuvant in the treatment of open fractures. It remains unclear however whether the beads causelong-term adverse events if not removed. The purpose of this study was to determine if removal of antibiotic beads wasrequired in order to avoid long term comp...