• medical education
• medical journalism

Welcome to a slightly different issue of E&P. There are a lot of additional considerations for editing when you decide you’re going to ask authors to aim for a more quirky edition. I’ll tell you the two main ones. The first is whether the authors of the more serious papers are going to take offence at being included alongside slightly lighter hearted ones. I have to tell you that I’ve not contacted all of the authors here to check that they’re OK with this; what I was able to do instead was ensure that the quirkier papers we did have were good enough to stand alone—I hope you agree. I do hope the non-quirky authors are OK with this.

The second important consideration was: What makes a good quirky paper? Our much bigger sibling, the BMJ, has a seasonal edition, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a formal setting out …