Minerva

A reminder to authors worried about publication in time for the UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) 2008 deadline of 31 December 2007. An Online First research article on bmj.com is not a “preprint”: it represents the full publication of that article. The bibliographic information is forwarded immediately to PubMed and other indexing agencies, so the article can be searched for and found on bibliographical databases and can be cited as published. The citation format appears at the top of the online article.

Protocols in human studies of raw honey used in surgical wound healing vary from applying it twice daily to every hour. A review of the medicinal value of honey in the International Journal of Clinical Practice (2007;61:1705-7 doi: 10.1111/j.1742-1241.2007.01417.x) says that honey is especially indicated when wounds become infected or fail to close. It may be indicated even more for the wounds left by laparoscopic surgery to remove cancer. Manuka seems to be the honey of choice.

Much has been written about the effect of giving the results of …