Institute of Occupational Medicine, Rouen University Hospital, France.
BMC Med Inform Decis Mak. 2011 Jan 21;11:3. doi: 10.1186/1472-6947-11-3.
General practitioners and medical specialists mainly rely on one "general medical" journal to keep their medical knowledge up to date. Nevertheless, it is not known if these journals display the same overview of the medical knowledge in different specialties. The aims of this study were to measure the relative weight of the different specialties in the major journals of general medicine, to evaluate the trends in these weights over a ten-year period and to compare the journals.
The 14,091 articles published in The Lancet, the NEJM, the JAMA and the BMJ in 1997, 2002 and 2007 were analyzed. The relative weight of the medical specialities was determined by categorization of all the articles, using a categorization algorithm which inferred the medical specialties relevant to each article MEDLINE file from the MeSH terms used by the indexers of the US National Library of Medicine to describe each article.
The 14,091 articles included in our study were indexed by 22,155 major MeSH terms, which were categorized into 81 different medical specialties. Cardiology and Neurology were in the first 3 specialties in the 4 journals. Five and 15 specialties were systematically ranked in the first 10 and first 20 in the four journals respectively. Among the first 30 specialties, 23 were common to the four journals. For each speciality, the trends over a 10-year period were different from one journal to another, with no consistency and no obvious explanatory factor.
Overall, the representation of many specialties in the four journals in general and internal medicine included in this study may differ, probably due to different editorial policies. Reading only one of these journals may provide a reliable but only partial overview.
全科医生和医学专家主要依赖于一种“普通医学”期刊来更新他们的医学知识。然而，目前尚不清楚这些期刊是否在不同专业领域展示了相同的医学知识概述。本研究的目的是衡量普通医学主要期刊中不同专业的相对权重，评估这些权重在十年期间的变化趋势，并对这些期刊进行比较。
分析了 1997 年、2002 年和 2007 年《柳叶刀》、《新英格兰医学杂志》、《美国医学会杂志》和《英国医学杂志》上发表的 14091 篇文章。通过对所有文章进行分类，使用一种分类算法来确定医学专业的相对权重，该算法从美国国家医学图书馆的索引员用于描述每篇文章的 MeSH 术语中推断出与每篇文章相关的医学专业。
我们的研究共纳入 14091 篇文章，这些文章被 22155 个主要 MeSH 术语索引，这些术语被分为 81 个不同的医学专业。在这 4 种期刊中，心脏病学和神经病学位列前 3 位。5 个和 15 个专业分别在 4 种期刊的前 10 位和前 20 位中系统地排名。在前 30 个专业中，有 23 个专业在这 4 种期刊中都有。对于每个专业，10 年间的趋势在不同期刊之间存在差异，没有一致性，也没有明显的解释因素。
总的来说，这四种期刊对包括本研究在内的普通医学和内科的许多专业的代表性可能存在差异，这可能是由于不同的编辑政策所致。仅阅读其中一种期刊可能提供可靠但仅部分概述。
