Focus on Research

Abstract

The readers of Deutsches Arzteblatt take it for granted that our journal contains original scientific reports. Nowadays, that is. For many decades, Deutsches Arzteblatt was a purely political organ of physicians in Germany, and it was only in the 1950s that it began regularly printing articles of an educational nature by scientific authors. In the meantime, carefully checked review articles and continuing medical education (CME) articles have become one of the hallmarks of Deutsches Arzteblatt. But what about original articles, i.e., initial publications of scientific research findings? The term “original article” comprises a number of subvarieties originating in different fields of medical science. Reports of experimental studies are among the most common types (basic research: laboratory investigations, animal experiments); epidemiological research includes cohort studies, case-control studies, and cross-sectional studies. Finally, clinical research includes, among other types of study, case reports, open observational studies, and the gold standard of research in clinical medicine—randomized clinical trials. This short overview is intended to document the presence and distribution of these types of original articles in Deutsches Arzteblatt since the introduction of the medical-scientific section of the journal, i.e., the section that currently appears under the heading “Medicine.” The purpose of this analysis is not just to satisfy our own curiosity, but to identify some important clinical studies that are not yet represented in databases such as Medline. As early as 1995, Egger and Smith (1) pointed out that many clinical studies are published in journals that are not represented in the international bibliographical databases—a problem that can lead to distorted conclusions in reviews and meta-analyses. Deutsches Arzteblatt has only recently found its way into international databases such as Medline and Embase: Its scientific articles have appeared in Medline only from 2008 onward. Thus, all articles published in Deutsches Arzteblatt before 2008 cannot be retrieved by a Medline search, which is the usual means of searching for articles on any medical topic. Yet some important articles were, of course, published in Deutsches Arzteblatt before 2008. Broad-based analyses of articles in other publications (2) have led to the rescue of many controlled studies from oblivion. As a consequence, many that are not retrievable on Medline can now be found in the Cochrane Controlled Trials Register, a database that has become an important source of review articles.