Impact factor and electronic versions of biomedical scientific journals.
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BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: The development of electronic editions of scientific journals and the rapid spread of scientific information might modify the pattern the bibliographic citations, and thus the impact factor and quality of journals. We assessed changes in the impact factor over years of a number of journals and whether the presence of an electronic version of the journal was associated with the impact factor score. DESIGN AND METHODS: This is a retrospective longitudinal study. The availability of journals (table of contents (TOC), abstracts, full text and free full text) on Internet, in years 1995-2000, was assessed between December 2000 and January 2001. The first 20 top-journals from 8 subject categories were included. Changes in impact factor over time and association with Internet availability were modeled. RESULTS: Overall, 118/139 journals (85%) had their TOC on the Internet, of these 107 (77%) had abstracts, 97 (70%) had full text and 33 (24%) free full text. The median impact factor for all journals was 1.65, 2.08, 2.10, 2.21 and 2.35 for the years from 1995 to 1999, respectively. This increase was statistically significant, with differences among subject categories. The presence of TOC, abstracts and full text on the Internet was also significantly associated with higher impact factor, after accounting for time and subject category. INTERPRETATION AND CONCLUSIONS: The impact factor has been used for assessing the quality of journals. We identified a new limitation of this indicator: the impact factor seems to be related to the amount of circulation of information through Internet. This could be a temporary limitation, associated with diffusion of journals on, and spread of Internet. (+info)
Protection of patients' rights to privacy.
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The following statement was agreed [upon] by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (the Vancouver Group) at its meeting last week in San Francisco. It is a complete revision of the initial guidelines on this subject issued in 1991. (+info)
BMJ response to Dr. Gupta.
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We sent a questionnaire survey to a random sample of 125 correspondents to the BMJ who had previously sent a letter which had been rejected. The objective was to evaluate the policy of sending on some unpublished letters to the authors of the articles to which they referred. There were 94 replies, a response rate of 75%. The key finding was that although most respondents agreed with the policy, a third thought it unconstructive. A quarter of the respondents said that the BMJ policy would discourage them from sending a letter to the journal for publication. This survey has led to a change of policy at the BMJ. Letters which are not published are not now sent on to the authors of the original articles. (+info)
Writing for publication--a guide for new authors.
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Health care practitioners who are inexperienced in writing for publication are sometimes daunted by the publication process and fail to submit their work on quality improvement to a journal. New authors can acquire experience in writing a paper by working through a systematic thought process that includes consideration of what journal readers and editors want and if the work is ready for publication. The most important part of writing a paper is to think through the key ideas and messages for readers and then to organize the ideas into a logical structure. Writing clear answers to 10 key questions may be one way to start the process. (+info)
How well is the clinical importance of study results reported? An assessment of randomized controlled trials.
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BACKGROUND: The interpretation of the results of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) has traditionally emphasized statistical significance rather than clinical importance. Our aim was to assess the quality of reporting of factors related to clinical importance in a sample of published RCTs. METHODS: A random sample of 27 (of a total of 266) RCTs published in 5 major medical journals over a 1-year period were reviewed by 4 independent reviewers for factors considered important in the interpretation of the clinical importance of study results: identification of a clearly defined primary outcome, reporting of the expected difference between groups used in the calculation of sample size (the delta value) and whether it was based on the minimal clinically important difference of the intervention, the statistical significance of the results, presentation of pertinent confidence intervals, and the authors' interpretation of the clinical importance of the results. RESULTS: Twenty-two of 27 (81%) articles explicitly reported a single primary outcome. Of the 20 articles that included a sample size calculation, 18 (90%) reported a delta value. Two of the 18 (11%) articles explicitly stated that the delta value was chosen to reflect the minimal clinically important difference of the intervention. For the primary outcomes, confidence intervals surrounding the point estimates of the efficacy of the interventions were reported in 11 of 27 (41%) studies. The study results were interpreted from the perspective of clinical importance in 20 of 27 (74%) of the articles. Of these 20 reports, 5 (25%) provided justification for their clinical interpretation of the results. INTERPRETATION: Authors of RCTs published in major general medical and internal medicine journals do not consistently provide their own interpretation of the clinical importance of their results, and they often do not provide sufficient information to allow readers to make their own interpretation. (+info)
Can examination of WWW usage statistics and other indirect quality indicators distinguish the relative quality of medical web sites?
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BACKGROUND: The Internet offers a great amount of health related websites, but concern has been raised about their reliability. Several subjective evaluation criteria and websites rating systems have been proposed as a help for the Internet users to distinguish among web resources with different quality, but their efficacy has not been proven. OBJECTIVES: To evaluate the agreement of a subset of Internet rating systems editorial boards regarding their evaluations of a sample of pediatric websites. To evaluate certain websites characteristics as possible quality indicators for pediatric websites. METHODS: Comparative survey of the Results of systematic evaluations of the contents and formal aspects of a sample of pediatric websites, with the number of daily visits to those websites, the time since their last update, the impact factor of their authors or editors, and the number of websites linked to them. RESULTS: 363 websites were compiled from eight rating systems. Only 25 were indexed and evaluated by at least two rating systems. This subset included more updated and more linked websites. There was no correlation among the Results of the evaluation of these 25 websites by the rating systems. The number of inbound links to the websites significantly correlated with their updating frequency (p<.001), with the number of daily visits (p=.005), and with the Results of their evaluation by the largest rating system, HealthAtoZ (p<.001). The websites updating frequency also significantly correlated with the RESULTS of the websites evaluation by HealthAtoZ, both about their contents (p=.001) and their total values (p<.05). The number of daily visits significantly correlated (p<.05) with the Results of the evaluations by Medical Matrix. CONCLUSIONS: Some websites characteristics as the number of daily visits, their updating frequency and, overall, the number of websites linked to them, correlate with their evaluation by some of the largest rating systems on the Internet, what means that certain indexes obtained from the usage analysis of pediatric websites could be used as quality indicators. On the other hand, the citation analysis on the Web by the quantification of inbound links to medical websites could be an objective and feasible tool in rating great amounts of websites. (+info)
Peer review in a post-eprints world: a proposal.
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Recently, a number of electronic biomedical preprints servers, which allow the archiving of electronic papers without prior peer review, have been established, most notably the Clinical Medicine & Health Research NetPrints website and the The Lancet's Electronic Research Archive. These mark an extension to clinical medicine and health research of a novel experiment in the provision of public access to electronic versions of preprints. However, until now the biomedical community has been slow to adopt this new form of communication. This paper discusses how the value and attractiveness of eprint servers can be improved, and how electronic preprints (eprints, NetPrints) can be evaluated. Previous studies of variations in rejection rates after conventional peer review have indicated that the extent of scholarly consensus is an important variable for acceptance. This variable seems likely also to be important in readers' and editors' evaluations of eprints. A combination of unsolicited comments together with commissioned review might yield articles of higher quality than either could accomplish alone. However, if systematically applied to all eprints, such a process would be time-consuming and labor-intensive. A sequential review process is proposed, beginning with the acceptance of a preprint by an eprint server, followed by revision on the basis of comments received publicly or privately, and by the solicitation of selected eprints for commissioned review. This sequential process could have advantages, both for the authors of articles, and for journal editors. For example, the eprint would, in effect, have been submitted simultaneously to a large number of relevant journals. Some issues about evaluative studies of the outcomes of eprint submissions are also considered briefly. It would be particularly valuable if every eprint server included access to comparative statistics on visits by readers to individual eprints. (+info)
The FlyBase database of the Drosophila genome projects and community literature.
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FlyBase (http://flybase.bio.indiana.edu/) provides an integrated view of the fundamental genomic and genetic data on the major genetic model Drosophila melanogaster and related species. Following on the success of the Drosophila genome project, FlyBase has primary responsibility for the continual reannotation of the D.melanogaster genome. The ultimate goal of the reannotation effort is to decorate the euchromatic sequence of the genome with as much biological information as is available from the community and from the major genome project centers. The current cycle of reannotation focuses on establishing a comprehensive data set of gene models (i.e. transcription units and CDSs). There are many points of entry to the genome within FlyBase, most notably through maps, gene ontologies, structured phenotypic and gene expression data, and anatomy. (+info)