Medical Journalism

Human biospecimens are subject to a number of different collection, processing, and storage factors that can significantly alter their molecular composition and consistency. These biospecimen preanalytical factors, in turn, influence experimental outcomes and the ability to reproduce scientific results. Currently, the extent and type of information specific to the biospecimen preanalytical conditions reported in scientific publications and regulatory submissions varies widely. To improve the quality of research utilizing human tissues, it is critical that information regarding the handling of biospecimens be reported in a thorough, accurate, and standardized manner. The Biospecimen Reporting for Improved Study Quality recommendations outlined herein are intended to apply to any study in which human biospecimens are used. The purpose of reporting these details is to supply others, from researchers to regulators, with more consistent and standardized information to better evaluate, interpret, compare, and reproduce the experimental results. The Biospecimen Reporting for Improved Study Quality guidelines are proposed as an important and timely resource tool to strengthen communication and publications around biospecimen-related research and help reassure patient contributors and the advocacy community that the contributions are valued and respected.

Context Medical issues are widely reported in the mass media. These reports influence the general public, policy makers and health-care professionals. This information should be valid, but is often criticized for being speculative, inaccurate and misleading. An understanding of the obstacles medical reporters meet in their work can guide strategies for improving the informative value of medical journalism.

Learning in Medicine. Titles were categorised as informative, indicative, neither, or both. Abstracts were evaluated for the presence of a rationale, objective, descriptions of study design, setting, participants, study intervention and comparison group, main outcomes, results and conclusions.

Successful production of a written product for submission to a peer-reviewed scientific journal requires substantial effort. Such an effort can be maximized by following a few simple suggestions when composing/ creating the product for submission. By following some suggested guidelines and avoiding common errors, the process can be streamlined and success realized for even beginning/novice authors as they negotiate the publication process. The purpose of this invited commentary is to offer practical suggestions for achieving success when writing and submitting manuscripts to The International Journal of Sports Physical Therapy and other professional journals.

After thirty-six years of biennial updates, the authors take great pride in being able to publish the nineteenth version (2001) of the "Brandon/Hill Selected List of Print Books and Journals for the Small Medical Library." This list of 630 books and 143 journals is intended as a selection guide for health sciences libraries or similar facilities. It can also function as a core collection for a library consortium. Books and journals are categorized by subject; the book list is followed by an author/editor index, and the subject list of journals, by an alphabetical title listing. Due to continuing requests from librarians, a "minimal core list" consisting of 81 titles has been pulled out from the 217 asterisked (*) initial-purchase books and marked with daggers (dagger *) before the asterisks. To purchase the entire collection of 630 books and to pay for 143 2001 journal subscriptions would require $124,000. The cost of only the asterisked items, books and journals...

In recent years, academic publishing has been faced with many destructive phenomena. “Predatory publishers” (or journals) are one challenge for  cholarly publishing. This term was introduced to academic societies for the first time by Jeffrey Beall in 2010. This letter to editor is about predatory journals and perished articles in the field of emergency medicine.

Environmental Health is now firmly established as a major venue for publishing in the field of environmental health. While remaining selective in our acceptances -of the 217 manuscripts that we have processed by June 2007, 115 (53%) were accepted -the number of manuscripts continues to grow from year to year. Last year we published 33 articles (of 64 submitted) and the number of submissions by June this year has already reached 40. The journal has now been in existence for five years, so the time seems ripe for us to assess the health of our journal and the opportunities offered by open access publication on the Internet.

Covering science-medical news is of paramount importance for newspapers; at the same time it requires
careful attention, because it represents a primary source for citizens, governments, public opinion. Through a
qualitative content analysis, the paper analyses the way in which two Italian daily newspapers covered the most
controversial medical case of the last years in Italy: the so-called “Stamina case”. The research shows that, also
referring to science-medical news, journalists have to balance themselves between strict and rigorous reporting of
events, and attracting and maintaining the readers’ interest.

Scientific journals have a central place in protecting research integrity because published articles are the most visible documentation of research. We used SWOT analysis to audit (S)trengths and (W)eaknesses as internal and (O)pportunities and (T)hreats as external factors affecting journals' responsibility in addressing research integrity issues. Strengths include editorial independence, authority and expertise, power to formulate editorial policies, and responsibility for the integrity of published records. Weaknesses stem from having no mandate for legal action, reluctance to get involved, and lack of training. Opportunities for editors are new technologies for detecting misconduct, policies by editorial organization or national institutions, and greater transparency of published research. Editors face threats from the lack of legal regulation and culture of research integrity in academic communities, lack of support from stakeholders in scientific publishing, and different ...

Authors of scientific articles and journal editors are subject to antidefamation publication laws. We describe our experience with an accusation of libel. We define libel as it involves the medical literature and explain the ways in which threats of libel influence editorial decisionmaking and lead to negative publication bias by presenting examples drawn from the medical and legal literature.

The aim of this article is to give a brief guide to scientific writing to encourage more clinicians to take the plunge and write up that unusual case or present the results of their experience with a new treatment or surgical technique. Its target audience is the practitioner who wishes to publish clinical material and the young academic, clinical resident or research fellow. Both groups require guidance in the early days of their publishing career.

Understanding dementia is a pressing social challenge. This article draws on the 'Dementia talking: care conversation and communication' project which aims to understand how talk about, and to people living with dementia is constructed. In this article I draw on the construction of dementia manifest in two data sets - a corpus of 350 recent UK national newspaper articles and qualitative data derived from in-depth interviews with informal carers. These data were analysed using a thematic discursive approach. A 'panic-blame' framework was evident in much of the print media coverage. Dementia was represented in catastrophic terms as a 'tsunami' and 'worse than death', juxtaposed with coverage of individualistic behavioural change and lifestyle recommendations to 'stave off' the condition. Contrary to this media discourse, in carers' talk there was scant use of hyperbolic metaphor or reference to individual responsibility for dementia, and any...

The original study of journal prices, using the "Brandon/ Hill Selected List of Books and Journals for the Small Medical Library," was first published in 1980 and periodically updated. This research continues to measure price increases for these titles for the periods 1996 to 1999 and 1999 to 2002. The 111 journal titles that have appeared in each published list from 1967 to 2001 were included in the study. Institutional subscription price data were gathered for each journal for the years 1996, 1999, and 2002 and were compared to the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for the same years. The average journal price continues to rise significantly and is independent of the CPI. The study found that prices have jumped 51.9% from 1996 to 1999 and 32% from 1999 to 2002, which is consistent with nearly every recent journal price study. The unprecedented rise in journal prices negatively affects the purchasing power of medical libraries. This paper examines the economic and technological ...

■ Abstract The systematic review "movement" that has transformed medical journal reports of clinical trials and reviews of clinical trials has taken hold in public health, with the most recent milestone, the publication of the first edition of The Guide to Community Health Services in 2005. In this paper we define and distinguish current terms, point out important resources for systematic reviews, describe the impact of systematic review on the quality of primary studies and summaries of the evidence, and provide perspectives on the promise of systematic reviews for shaping the agenda for public health research. Several pitfalls are discussed, including a false sense of rigor implied by the terms "systematic review" and "meta-analysis" and substantial variation in the validity of claims that a particular intervention is "evidence based," and the difficulty of translating conclusions from systematic reviews into public health advocacy and practice.

This article explores how HIV is constituted as a matter of public concern in Australia, where – unlike much of the rest of the world – there is a continuing low incidence of heterosexual transmission. In this context, it is timely to explore how the media contributes to the ongoing mobilization of public interest in HIV, and how heterosexual audiences are brought into focus as the imagined ‘publics’ of mainstream debates on HIV. This article identifies three approaches to generating public concern in HIV news stories published in The Sydney Morning Herald between 2000 and 2005 as well as in academic media analysis and HIV education and advocacy. Reflections on fear revisit the early years of the epidemic, distinguishing a generation of Australian audiences shaped by the Grim Reaper campaign. Encounters with complacency focus on an apparently widespread lack of concern about HIV in the present. And projections in risk forecast a multiplication of HIV risk environments, despite confusion about who should be personally concerned about those risks. Together they construct Australian publics as passive, vulnerable, unaware and potentially uncaring, yet do little to engage the mainstream as more than spectators of public concern about HIV.

A medicina, a par de outras ciências médicas, possui
um valor social muito relevante, pelo que o jornalismo
atribui-lhe um grande potencial noticioso. Por consequência,
é visível nos meios de comunicação social a
quantidade, nem sempre acompanhada por qualidade,
de informação cujo âmbito pertence à medicina. Este livro
é baseado na tese de doutoramento da autora nesta
área, apresentada em 2012, cujo principal intuito foi investigar
e caraterizar os jornais de informação médica
em Portugal, estabelecendo distinções e pontos em comum
com outras publicações na área da medicina. Isto
foi feito através do estudo do contexto de produção dos
jornais de informação médica, bem como pela análise
dos mesmos como produto final.

To investigate the dosimetric accuracy of the sliding window gated IMRT compared with the static treatment, using varying dose rates. Materials and methods: This study measured changes in output and diode array response with changing dose rate, verified the precision of the motion table, and measured changes in dose distribution accuracy with film and diodes at two depths with changing dose rate. During 4DCT (4 Dimensional Computed Tomography), the patient's respiratory signals and target motion were recorded and imported to the XY4D simulation table of SUN NUCLEAR Corporation to simulate the patient's respiration and tumour motion. A single field of each sliding window IMRT plan with 30º wedge and one for lung cancer were used in this study. Three irradiating conditions, static and moving target with and without gating, were applied to both plans. Results: The standard deviations of output, with the dose rates changing from 300-600 MU/min, were 0.065 cGy and 0.169 cGy for the ionisation chamber and diode, respectively. The verification of the motion table shows very good precision with 9.98 ± 0.02 cm (true value = 10.0 cm). The measurements by MapCheck show the gamma index of the planned absolute dose distribution in static and moving targets with gating, resulting in more than 96% passing for all dose rates. The absolute dose distribution measured by film for the static target was agreeable with the value of moving target with gating. Conclusion: The sliding window gated IMRT technique is able to deliver an accurate dose to a moving target with the dose rate of 300-600 MU/min that is suitable for clinical treatment.

This article has been approved for the Medical Library Association's Independent Reading Program (IRP). Alper et al. 430 J Med Libr Assoc 92(4) October 2004 Objectives: Medicine must keep current with the research literature, and keeping current requires continuously updating the clinical knowledgebase (i.e., references that provide answers to clinical questions). The authors estimated the volume of medical literature potentially relevant to primary care published in a month and the time required for physicians trained in medical epidemiology to evaluate it for updating a clinical knowledgebase. Methods: We included journals listed in five primary care journal review services (ACP Journal Club, DynaMed, Evidence-Based Practice, Journal Watch, and QuickScan Reviews). Finding little overlap, we added the 2001 ''Brandon/Hill Selected List of Print Books and Journals for the Small Medical Library.'' We counted articles (including letters, editorials, and other commentaries) published in March 2002, using bibliographic software where possible and hand counting when necessary. For journals not published in March 2002, we reviewed the nearest issue. Five primary care physicians independently evaluated fifty randomly selected articles and timed the process. Results: The combined list contained 341 currently active journals with 8,265 articles. Adjusting for publication frequency, we estimate 7,287 articles are published monthly in this set of journals. Physicians trained in epidemiology would take an estimated 627.5 hours per month to evaluate these articles. Conclusions: To provide practicing clinicians with the best current evidence, more comprehensive and systematic literature surveillance efforts are needed.

Background: Journal advertising is one of the main sources of medicines information to doctors. Despite the availability of regulations and controls of drug promotion worldwide, information on medicines provided in journal advertising has been criticized in several studies for being of poor quality. However, no attempt has been made to systematically summarise this body of research. We designed this systematic review to assess all studies that have examined the quality of pharmaceutical advertisements for prescription products in medical and pharmacy journals.

Focusing events and climate change communication View project Mass media campaigns have long been a tool for promoting public health. How effective are such campaigns in changing health-related attitudes and behaviors, however, and how has the literature in this area progressed over the past decade?

Background: International guidelines on research have focused on protecting research participants. Ethical Research Committee (ERC) approval and informed consent are the cornerstones. Externally sponsored research requires approval through ethical review in both the host and the sponsoring country. This study aimed to determine to what extent ERC approval and informed consent procedures are documented in locally and internationally published human subject research carried out in Sri Lanka.

In times of globalization there is an increasing use of English in the medical literature. The aim of this study was to analyze the influence of English-language articles in multi-language medical journals on their international recognition -as measured by a lower rate of self-citations and higher impact factor (IF).

News coverage of health topics influences knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors at the individual level, and agendas and actions at the institutional and policy levels. Because disparities in health often are the result of social inequalities that require community-level or policy-level solutions, news stories employing a health disparities news frame may contribute to agenda-setting among opinion leaders and policymakers and lead to policy efforts aimed at reducing health disparities. This study objective was to conduc an exploratory analysis to qualitatively describe barriers that health journalists face when covering health disparities in local media. Between June and October 2007, 18 journalists from television, print, and radio in Boston, Lawrence, and Worcester, Massachusetts, were recruited using a purposive sampling technique. In-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted by telephone, and the crystallization/immersion method was used to conduct a qualitative analysis of interview transcripts. Our results revealed that journalists said that they consider several angles when developing health stories, including public impact and personal behavior change. Challenges to employing a health disparities frame included inability to translate how research findings may impact different socioeconomic groups, and difficulty understanding how findings may translate across racial/ethnic groups. Several journalists reported that disparities-focused stories are "less palatable" for some audiences. This exploratory study offers insights into the challenges that local news media face in using health disparities news frames in their routine coverage of health news. Public health practitioners may use these findings to inform communication efforts with local media in order to advance the public dialogue about health disparities.

News stories reporting race-specific health information commonly emphasize disparities between racial groups. But recent research suggests this focus on disparities has unintended effects on African American audiences, generating negative emotions and less interest in preventive behaviors (Nicholson RA, Kreuter MW, Lapka C et al. Unintended effects of emphasizing disparities in cancer communication to African-Americans. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2008; 17: 2946-52). They found that black adults are more interested in cancer screening after reading about the progress African Americans have made in fighting cancer than after reading stories emphasizing disparities between blacks and whites. This study builds on past findings by (i) examining how health journalists judge the newsworthiness of stories that report racespecific health information by emphasizing disparities versus progress and (ii) determining whether these judgments can be changed by informing journalists of audience reactions to disparity versus progress framing. In a doubleblind-randomized experiment, 175 health journalists read either a disparity-or progressframed story on colon cancer, preceded by either an inoculation about audience effects of such framing or an unrelated (i.e. control) information stimuli. Journalists rated the disparity-frame story more favorably than the progress-frame story in every category of news values. However, the inoculation significantly increased positive reactions to the progress-frame story. Informing journalists of audience reactions to race-specific health information could influence how health news stories are framed.