In 2024, many authors make outstanding contributions to our journal. Their articles published with us have received very well feedback in the field and stimulate a lot of discussions and new insights among the peers.

Hereby, we would like to highlight some of our outstanding authors who have been making immense efforts in their research fields, with a brief interview of their unique perspectives and insightful views as authors.

Outstanding Authors (2024)

Giuseppe Autorino, Centre Hospitalier Universitare Vaudois, Switzerland

Elixabet Lopez-Lopez, The University of the Basque Country, Spain

Outstanding Author

Giuseppe Autorino

Dr. Giuseppe Autorino is a pediatric surgeon currently working at the CHUV in Lausanne. He graduated from the University of Naples Federico II and conducted his pediatric surgery residency in Naples, Italy. He was fascinated with all that concerned minimally invasive surgery and the application of new technologies: thanks to Naples’ department, he managed to discover his passion for pediatric urology and robotic surgery. The experience he had in the Pediatric and Orthopedic Surgery department in Bellinzona, Switzerland further confirmed his inclination and gave him a new perspective on conducting research activities. He is an active member of the ESPES society, through which he had the opportunity to meet brilliant minds who were an immense source of inspiration. Finally, he completed his residency with a master’s thesis on the use of ICG in varicocele treatment for children. A list of Dr. Autorino’s research works can be found here.

Dr. Giuseppe points out that academic writing is the base of modern Evidence-Based Medicine. Every time a colleague faces something he is unsure about, the first process to solve that specific patient’s problem is thorough research through international literature. Furthermore, with the evolution of analysis available to process numerous papers, it is possible to mitigate the scarcity of cases in certain branches of medicine and reach results that would be impossible for a single institution. Finally, thanks to international literature, the medical community can advance together, evolving and learning from potential mistakes.

Dr. Giuseppe believes that the first step to be a good writer is to being a good reader. Learning to understand a paper’s quality has become the first step in creating the basis to then develop new ideas that will be able to improve knowledge in the medical field. Moreover, the best authors are those able to transform an idea into a concrete project: it is important to have the ability to link an abstract idea to reality.

“Data is the core of a scientific study. They should be crystal clear and available because data creates foundations on which the article is then developed. Thus, an article without clear data cannot be fully understood and useful. Available data on a paper allows the reader to verify the validity of the hypothesis brought forward in the paper,” Dr. Giuseppe says.

(by Sasa Zhu, Brad Li)

Elixabet Lopez-Lopez

Dr. Elixabet Lopez-Lopez, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU and a Researcher affiliated with Biobizkaia Health Research Institute. She has dedicated her career so far to the search for pharmacogenomics markers to improve the treatment of pediatric oncology patients. During her PhD and postdoctoral training, at the UPV/EHU (Spain), Erasmus MC (The Netherlands), and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital (USA), she studied gene and miRNA expression, methylation, SNPs and copy number alterations in association with methotrexate and vincristine response and toxicity in acute lymphoblastic leukemia patients. Nowadays, she is the PI of a research line centered on high throughput analysis of long non-coding RNAs as prognostic biomarkers in pediatric acute lymphoblastic leukemia, and mentors undergraduate and postgraduate students. Connect with her on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Dr. Lopez-Lopez thinks that the following things are the elements a good academic paper should include. First, it should be well structured, so there is a great need to organize all thoughts prior to writing. In addition to that, it should be coherent, from the title to the conclusions, including all the sections of the document, and clarity, for the message to be well understood by the audience.

To Dr. Lopez-Lopez, academic writing is a hard part of research, but it is mandatory if researchers want to share their findings. There is a whole world between seeing raw data and a well-written manuscript, explaining all the work and thoughts that researchers have put into that project, which is worth the effort.

“I think it is important to share the results to help science advance. This way, other scientists will benefit from the results we have obtained to design their projects. As I have already mentioned, it may be difficult to understand raw data without context, so a well-written paper is the key to the sharing process. Therefore, knowing the relevance that academic writing will have for the scientific community motivated me to contribute to the field,” Dr. Lopez-Lopez says.

(by Sasa Zhu, Brad Li)