Journal Studies
Doctors of medicine and science share research findings via the journals of their profession. These journals can be of general interest, as with the New England Journal of Medicine, and the Journal of the American Medical Association. Mostly, they are specialized by disease. Cardiologists contribute to, and read, the journal called Circulation. Doctors working with cancer read the Journal of Clinical Oncology. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (AJCN) is the main journal for nutrition. (There is also the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, and the British Journal of Nutrition with archives dating to 1947.)
Though they can be difficult to read, many journal articles are highly interesting. Entries are “peer-reviewed”, meaning they have previously been studied and challenged by other professionals in the field. The journals also provide a forum to debate findings that are controversial. All in all, journals provide a valued service.
Although journal research is often funded by us, the taxpayers (through governmental bodies, like the National Institutes of Health), access to these journals is difficult. Subscriptions are too expensive for the ordinary person. (Some journals are available through the libraries of med schools and larger hospitals, if you have access.)
There are two limited forms of public sharing: The more interesting articles are reported in newspapers, and popular health magazines. Unfortunately these accounts are often sensationalized, to catch the reader’s eye, and may give a distorted view. (In my experience, the best reporting on journal articles is done by The New York Times, which also provides public access to their archive of past articles.)
An abbreviated form of public access is through the abstract of an article. An abstract is a condensed version of several paragraphs that summarizes the objective, design, results and any conclusions from the study. Abstracts are presented by services such as PubMed and can be viewed at “Goggle scholar”. So another service of this blog is to report on journal articles of interest. These may be recent articles or relevant past classics (public access is often available for older articles).
In this initial posting I suggest you check out a recent summary of the 50 most-read AJCN articles (some of these classic articles are ten years old but still relevant). You can Google or simply go http://www.ajcn.org/reports/most-read. I summarized the top 50 for subjects of most interest. Vitamin D was the most frequent, with nine articles; dietary sugar had six; and there were four articles on obesity. Pick an article that fits your interest, read the abstract and then as much of the full text as you find interesting. Enjoy.
Saturday, December 11, 2010 at 4:37PM | by Skip Hellewell | 3 Comments | 1 Reference | Share Article | in journal studies | Email Article
Reader Comments (3)
There has been a push in the science community to give the public access to more scientific publications. The idea that public funding (usually from NIH) supports research that is only published in subscription-based journals has become harder and harder to justify. Because of that, now, if you receive NIH funding, and publish, your article must be accessible to the public.
For more information, take a look at NIH's Public Access webpage.
Another group, not willing to wait for the Public Access policy to be implemented and realizing the political clout that publishing houses have with congress, started a series of journals under the name, Public Library of Science (known as PLoS).
Clinical research/drug research is one of the last areas to give in to this trend - there is a lot of money involved in these publications - but I hope that soon this field will start to open up.
Sciencegeek: You're the first to comment on Journal Studies, so thanks. I totally support the idea of PLoS. Please help us find great studies or reviews of interest. Skip
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