Citations Count

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Citations rule the world—at least the world of academic medicine. Because of the importance of the impact factor, medical journals are dependent on being cited as often as possible in other medical journals. This is also true of Deutsches Arzteblatt International, which, after its inclusion in the Science Citation Index in 2009, is expecting its first impact factor in 2011 (1). In this situation, it is easy to forget that citations in the lay press too are important for medical journals. Being mentioned in the general media may not enhance the impact factor, but is a sign of how important the public deems a journal. By studying the German lay press one can gain an impression as to whether the prejudice that medicine is completely anglicized is correct. Is it really true that only English language journals are important in the work of a German medical journalist? We have analyzed how often leading German lay media mentioned German and English language medical journals in the course of the preceding eight years. The analysis was based on six medical journals, which are comparable, as they all appear weekly and all cover a variety of medical subjects: the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, the British Medical Journal, Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift, Munchener Medizinische Wochenschrift, and Deutsches Arzteblatt (for details of the methods, see the Box). Box The frequency was examined of the citations of the scientific content of the following weekly medical journals: the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the British Medical Journal (BMJ), Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift, Munchener Medizinische Wochenschrift—Fortschritte der Medizin, and Deutsches Arzteblatt. The journals selected were all clinically orientated magazines for general medicine (rather than specialized journals). The survey was based on the results of a search in the online search machines of FAZ, Welt, SZ, Spiegel, and Zeit. The search only covered central printed products, so that, for example, the Frankfurter Allgemeinen Sonntagszeitung (Sunday Newspaper), the SZ Magazin and Spiegel Online were excluded. For reasons of capacity, we could only consider five of the important and serious printed media in Germany. All journal names were searched for under their complete titles (e.g. New England Journal of Medicine, Munchener Medizinische or Munchener Medizinische Wochenschrift—Fortschritte der Medizin) and their conventional abbreviations (NEJM, N Engl J Med, or MMW or MMW Fortschr Med). Different cases (e.g. Deutsche/r Medizinische/n Wochenschrift) or other close variants (e.g. Munchener/Munchner Medizinische Wochenschrift) were considered. A citation was only counted if it was a direct reference to the scientific content of one of the six medical journals. Thus, a reference to the appointments section of Deutsches Arzteblatt or the announcements of its publishers were not counted as scientific citations. The English edition of Deutsches Arzteblatt, Deutsches Arzteblatt International, was excluded from the evaluation. On the other hand, in a subanalysis, the citations for Deutsches Arzteblatt which related to its political reporting were counted seperately. To ensure a reliable check of the citation of a scientific journal, the full text of the lay journal or newspaper was always searched for. The search took place between November 2008 and March 2009.