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| The Lancet | |
|---|---|
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| Abbreviated title | Lancet |
| Discipline | peer-reviewed medical journal |
| Language | English |
| Publication details | |
| Publisher | Joseph Onwhyn (Britain) |
| Publication history | founded 1823 |
| Indexing | |
| ISSN | 0140-6736 |
| Links | |
This article is about the journal. For other uses of the term "lancet", see Lancet (disambiguation).
The Lancet is one of the most well-known peer-reviewed medical journals in the world, published weekly by Elsevier, part of Reed Elsevier. It was founded in 1823 by Thomas Wakley, who named it after the surgical instrument called a lancet, as well as an arched window ("to let in light").
The present editor-in-chief is Richard Horton. The Lancet takes a stand on several important medical issues - recent examples include criticism of the World Health Organization, rejecting the efficacy of homeopathy as a therapeutic option, disapproval during the time Reed Exhibitions hosted arms industry fairs, and a call in 2003 for tobacco to be made illegal.[1]
Contents |
Impact
The Lancet has a significant readership throughout the world with a high impact factor. It publishes original research articles, review articles ("seminars" and "reviews"), editorials, book reviews, correspondences, amidst other regulars such as news features and case reports. The Lancet is considered to be one of the "core" general medical journals, the others being the New England Journal of Medicine, the Canadian Medical Association Journal, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and the British Medical Journal. The Lancet's impact factor is currently ranked #2 among general medical journals Institute for Scientific Information Journal Citation Reports.citation needed
Journals family
The Lancet has now given birth to a few sub-speciality journals, all bearing the parent title — The Lancet Neurology (neurology), The Lancet Oncology (oncology) and The Lancet Infectious Diseases (infectious diseases). All of them have established significant reputations as medical journals, though most started out publishing only review articles.
Volume renumbering
Prior to 1990, Lancet had volume numbering that reset every year. Issues in January to June were in volume i, with the rest in volume ii. In 1990, Lancet moved to a sequential volume numbering scheme, with two volumes per year. Volumes were retro-actively assigned to the years prior to 1990, with the first issue of 1990 being assigned volume 335, and the last issue of 1989 assigned volume 334. The table of contents listing on Science Direct uses this new numbering scheme.[2]
Controversial articles
The Lancet was severely criticized after it published a paper in 1998, in which the authors suggested a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. In February 2004 The Lancet published a partial retraction of the paper (Lancet 2004;363:750).[3] The editor-in-chief, Richard Horton, went on the record to say the paper had "fatal conflicts of interest" because one of the authors, Andrew Wakefield, had a serious conflict of interest that he had not declared to The Lancet.[4]
The Lancet published a controversial estimate of the Iraq war's Iraqi death toll—around one hundred thousand—in 2004. In 2006 a followup study by the same team suggested that the violent death rate in Iraq was not only consistent with the earlier estimate, but had increased considerably in the intervening period (Lancet surveys of casualties of the Iraq War). The second survey estimated that there had been 654,965 excess Iraqi deaths as a consequence of the war. The 95% confidence interval was 392,979 to 942,636. 1849 households that contained 12,801 people were surveyed.[5]
In January 2006, it was revealed that data had been fabricated in an article[6] by the Norwegian cancer researcher Jon Sudbø and 13 co-authors published in The Lancet in October 2005.[7][8] Several articles in other scientific journals were withdrawn following the withdrawal in The Lancet. Within a week, the high-impact New England Journal of Medicine published an expression of editorial concern regarding its published research papers by the same author and in November 2006, the journal withdrew two oral cancer studies led by the Norwegian researcher.[9]
See also
- New England Journal of Medicine
- Journal of the American Medical Association
- The Medical Letter on Drugs and Therapeutics
- Canadian Medical Association Journal
- JAMA
- Nature Medicine
- British Medical Journal
- Annals of Internal Medicine
- Archives of Internal Medicine
- Journal Watch, sibling publication to NEJM
- List of medical journals
References
- ^ Ferriman, Annabel. Lancet calls for tobacco to be made illegal. BMJ 2003;327:1364 (13 December), doi:10.1136/bmj.327.7428.1364-b.
- ^ The Lancet. Science Direct.
- ^ Lyall, Joanna. Editor in the eye of a storm. BMJ 2004;328:528 (28 February), doi:10.1136/bmj.328.7438.528.
- ^ MMR researchers issue retraction. BBC News, online edition, 4 March 2004.
- ^ Coghlan, Ben. Gut reaction aside, those on the ground know Iraq reality. Eureka Street, 30 October 2006.
- ^ "Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and the risk of oral cancer: a nested case-control study". PMID: 16226613, PubMed indexed for MEDLINE.
- ^ Cancer study patients 'made up'. BBC News, online edition, 16 January 2006.
- ^ Hafstad, Anne. Største svindel verden har sett. Aftenposten, 17 January 2006. In Norwegian.
- ^ Cortez, Michelle Fay. Medical Journal Retracts Oral Cancer Studies Linked to Fraud. Bloomberg.com, 1 November 2006.
External links
Wikipedia content modification information:
- This page was last modified on 19 September 2008, at 15:55.
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