The finer points of writing and refereeing scientific articles

Writing scientific papers is a skill required by all haematologists. Many also need to be able to referee papers submitted to journals. These skills are not often formally taught and as a result may not be done well. We have reviewed published evidence of errors in these processes. Such errors may be ethical, scientific or linguistic, or may result from a lack of understanding of the processes. The objective of the review is, by highlighting errors, to help writers and referees to avoid them.