A cross-sectional analysis of family medicine publications in the indexed medical literature

Abstract

Background: Publications are important to the academic development of the field of family medicine. Not all manuscripts written by family physicians or family medicine faculty are published in family medicine journals. The purpose of this study was to determine where manuscripts generated by US family medicine department faculty are being published.

Methods: A MEDLINE search was performed for all English language articles published in 1979 and 1989. The search technique involved identifying articles that included the words "family" and "medicine" or "family" and "practice" in the institution field of the MEDLINE index. All identified articles were then manually reviewed to confirm authorship by family medicine department faculty. Article types were classified according to previously published schemata.

Results: The research identified 178 articles from 1979 and 328 articles form 1989. In 1979, 52% of the articles had been published in family medicine journals. In 1989, the percentage was exactly 50%. Biomedical articles comprised the largest category (approximately half) of articles. Educational articles were the second most common type.

Conclusions: The number of publications generated by family medicine faculty has grown, as has the number (but not the percentage) of articles published in non-family medicine journals.