Write the article

The ✍️ Write tab is a Markdown editor that knows two things a plain editor does not: the structure Radiopaedia recommends for this kind of article, and how their citations work.

The structure

Radiopaedia does not have one article structure. It has twenty-three. The standard one gives a fixed order — Terminology, Epidemiology, Clinical presentation, Pathology, Radiographic features, Treatment and prognosis, History and etymology, Differential diagnosis — and then says it holds "in most instances, except for the following specific special purpose articles", and lists eighteen of those. An anatomy article wants Gross anatomy and Variant anatomy and has no business being asked for Epidemiology.

⌗ Headings picks which structure the headings come from. It is guessed from the title and remembered once you change it. Insert the required ones, all of them, or one at a time on a line you choose — and if you put a heading where its parent is not, the app says so without refusing.

The parent is part of a heading's identity. Complications under Clinical presentation are the disease's; under Treatment and prognosis they are the therapy's. An article can want both.

Citing

Write the identifier, not a number:

The lesion was heterogeneous on CT [@27859258].

PMID, DOI, PMCID, ISBN or a URL. Numbers are worked out at export from the order of first appearance, so adding a source halfway through the article does not mean renumbering anything. Two tokens that turn out to be the same paper — a PMID and a DOI — become one reference, and the app says so.

🔎 Resolve citations asks radiopaedia.work/cite for each one. A resolved citation is cached forever: it is asked once per identifier, not once per draft.

The bibliography

The References panel holds the sources of this draft. They come from four places: added by hand, taken from the text, from your flagged articles, or from a reading list — which is the natural one, because a list made for a section of the article is that section's bibliography.

Getting it into their editor

Radiopaedia's editor is WYSIWYG: pasting plain text loses the formatting. Two buttons copy as rich text, so headings, bold and the <sup> markers survive. The article goes in the body; each reference line goes in its own reference box.

The linter

Radiopaedia publishes the rules their own linter applies. They are transcribed in data/lint-rules.json and run over your draft before you paste it — 🔴 errors, 🟠 warnings, 🔵 suggestions.

It is run on the HTML rather than the Markdown, because half the rules talk about <sup>, <strong>, <em> and headings, and in Markdown those tags do not exist yet.

Keeping a copy

Two files, and they are two different things. The .json is the draft — text, kind of article, references with their notes, and the citations already resolved — and it is the one Import reads back. The .md is to read: it opens in anything, years from now.