A comparison of the numbers of pharmaceutical advertising pages in family medicine research journals and journals in other medical disciplines

Abstract

Purpose: To determine whether declines in pharmaceutical industry advertising have been greater for family medicine research journals than for journals in other disciplines.

Method: Three family medicine research journals and eight randomly selected journals in other disciplines were chosen for this study. The number of advertising pages from the first issue of each journal from 1990 through 1995 were calculated by manually counting every journal page that contained all or part of an advertisement for a pharmaceutical product. Data were compared using Student's t-test.

Results: Overall, the mean number of pages of pharmaceutical advertising in all of the journals fell 41%, from 34 pages in 1990-1991 to 21 pages in 1994-1995. For the three family medicine journals the drop over the same six-year period was 55% (from 30 to 14, p = .01), compared with a 35% drop for the eight other journals (from 36 to 23, p < .001).

Conclusion: Although advertising in medical research journals has dropped in all disciplines, it would appear that the decline for family medicine journals has been disproportionately large. The potential effect of this decline for the discipline of family medicine is a decrease in the outlets and opportunities for the publication of new knowledge.