Health Information Research Unit, Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
Int J Obes (Lond). 2010 Oct;34(10):1526-30. doi: 10.1038/ijo.2009.268. Epub 2009 Dec 22.
This study identified the journals with the highest yield of clinical obesity research articles and surveyed the scatter of such studies across journals. The study exemplifies an approach to establish a journal collection that is likely to contain most new knowledge about a field.
All original studies that were cited in 40 systematic reviews about obesity topics ('included studies') were compiled and journal titles in which they were published were extracted. The journals were ranked by the number of included studies. The highest-yielding journals for clinical obesity and the scatter across journal titles were determined. A subset of these journals was created in MEDLINE (PubMed) to test search recall and precision for high-quality studies of obesity treatment (that is, articles that pass predetermined methodology criteria, including random allocation of participants to comparison groups, assessment of clinical outcomes, and at least 80% follow-up).
Articles in 252 journals were cited in the systematic reviews. The three highest-yielding journals specialized in obesity, but they published only 19.2% of the research, leaving 80.8% scattered across 249 non-obesity journals. The MEDLINE journal subset comprised 241 journals (11 journals were not indexed in MEDLINE) and included 82% of the clinical obesity research articles retrieved by a search for high-quality treatment studies ('recall' of 82%). Of the articles retrieved, 11% were about clinical obesity care ('precision' of 11%), compared with precision of 6% for obesity treatment studies in the full MEDLINE database.
Obesity journals captured only a small proportion of the literature on clinical obesity care. Those wishing to keep up in this field will need to develop more inclusive strategies than reading these specialty journals. A journal subset based on these findings may be useful when searching large electronic databases to increase search precision.
本研究确定了发表临床肥胖研究论文数量最多的期刊，并调查了这些研究在期刊中的分布情况。该研究展示了一种建立期刊馆藏的方法，这种方法可能包含该领域大部分新的知识。
将 40 篇关于肥胖主题的系统评价中引用的所有原始研究（“纳入研究”）进行汇编，并提取发表这些研究的期刊标题。根据纳入研究的数量对期刊进行排名。确定临床肥胖症的高产量期刊和期刊标题的分布情况。从这些期刊中创建了 MEDLINE（PubMed）的一个子集，以测试肥胖治疗高质量研究（即通过预定方法学标准评估的文章，包括参与者随机分配到比较组、评估临床结果和至少 80%的随访）的检索召回率和精度。
252 种期刊的文章被系统评价引用。排名前三的高产量期刊专门研究肥胖，但仅发表了 19.2%的研究，其余 80.8%的研究分布在 249 种非肥胖期刊中。MEDLINE 期刊子集包含 241 种期刊（11 种期刊未在 MEDLINE 中索引），包含通过检索高质量治疗研究（“召回率”为 82%）检索到的 82%的临床肥胖研究文章。检索到的文章中，11%是关于临床肥胖护理的（“精度”为 11%），而肥胖治疗研究的精度为 MEDLINE 数据库的 6%。
肥胖期刊仅收录了临床肥胖护理文献的一小部分。那些希望在这个领域保持领先的人需要制定比阅读这些专业期刊更具包容性的策略。基于这些发现的期刊子集在搜索大型电子数据库以提高检索精度时可能很有用。
