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Non-Tech : Bill Wexler's Dog Pound -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Druss who wrote (4588)	11/2/1999 12:56:00 AM
From: out_of_the_loop	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10293

They have a web site and their articles are online. They are published by Mosby, a St. Louis-based publishing company that publishes a lot of medical books and journals. There are a lot of ways to "rate" journals - subscription numbers, general fame, etc. The most famous journals you mentioned but there are a few others. In fact, most doctors regard the NEJM as the most prestigious and it contains articles about all aspects of medicine, surgery and health policy. Science and Nature, in fact, are basic science journals that are well-regarded but you would be hard-pressed to find a clinical doctor who gets or reads them. JAMA is distributed free to AMA members and is probably regarded as #2 to the NEJM. It is only through the recent leadership of Dr. Lundbergh, recently relieved of his post, that JAMA became a credible and widely respected journal. Most specialties have about 10-15 journals. My specialty, pathology, is so broad that there are about 30 journals associated with it. I won't list them unless you want me to fire them off. My point here is that the specialty-specific journals appeal to the specialists in more specific fields than JAMA and NEJM. In other words, they are more focused. In my field, Human Pathology or Laboratory Investigation would be analogous to Science and Modern Pathology and Archives of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine would be more like JAMA and NEJM, but specific to my specialty. A surgeon or internist would rarely look at them individually, but information from them might be incorporated by textbook authors or researchers looking up specifics about a topic. Many people do not read journals individually, but do their CME (continuing medical education) by reading reviews or going to courses specifically geared toward a specific subject review. For example, as a surgical pathologist, I see a fair amount of gynecologic pathology but I do not read gynecologic oncology journals. I did, however, recently attend a 6-hour course on uterine surgical pathology and it included a lot of information that had been printed in gynecologic oncology journals. This diatribe relates to Zicam in two ways. First, the journal in which the first study was printed is directed specifically to people who study epidemiology and infectious disease treatment/prevention in a clinical setting. The fact that other specialists may not read those journals or that generalists may not see them in the journal itself is not as important as the fact that they are in the searchable medline medical literature database so people doing a literature search on the treatment of the common cold will find it. I hope I answered your question. In summary, the journal is not as well-known as the NEJM but it is directed to epidemiologists and I.D. clinicians, two specialties that would be especially interested in new rhinovirus treatments. If you asked me if I was disappointed that the study did not make its debut in the NEJM, I would say yes; if you asked me if I thought it made the study less compelling or if it would have a negative impact on the product, I would say no. The more important study is yet to come, anyway.