The medical site WebScape has a service that caters to physicians called MedPulse. In about 20 specialty areas it surveys a dozen or two scientific journal and alerts subscribers to interesting or pertinent papers. I subscribe to the Public Health and Prevention topic and the other day got the list of the "most read" articles by subscribers in the last year. There is always something curiously fascinating about "top ten" lists and this was no exception. So what do you think preventive medicine types were reading on MedPulse newsletters the last year?
At the top of the list was a paper from Geriatrics and Aging (2007;10(3):182-191) with the title, "Why men die younger than women." It's hard to know if the popularity of this paper reflected curiosity, personal interest, professional interest or all three. Since I wasn't one of the subscribers who read it I can't tell you the answer (assuming the paper actually gives it).
The other papers on the list were what you might expect: smoking, weight control, one from the American Journal of Public Health entitled "Racial/Ethnic Differences in Physician Distrust in the United States" (I think that's a "personal interest" matter). The two surprises were number 5: "Noise Pollution: a Modern Plague" (South Med J. 2007;100(3):287-294) and number 9, the only bird flu paper: "Chlorine Inactivation of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza Virus (H5N1)." The citation given in the listing is wrong (although the link works). This at least is a paper you could have read about here since we discussed it in some detail in a post back in September when it was published in Emerging Infectious Diseases.
Still, there have been a lot of papers about bird flu published in the scientific literature in the last year and I would consider this one of the more peripheral. Certainly not one that compares with informative, concise and well written ones like the Webster and Govorkova review that appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine in November 2006. Of course that's not in the 2007 calendar year but it is a beautiful piece of writing.
It's interesting to ponder what there was about the title of the chlorination and bird flu paper that attracted readers. Influenza is not thought of (properly as far as we know) as a water borne disease. At least bird flu made it onto the list, which was a surprise to me. So there's interest out there.
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is there someone who rates the papers and gives
short reviews,short summaries ?
Plus a page where readers can vote for importance,
readability, time required to understand.
Also a statistics of papers by topic and how it
relates to amount of public funding for these
areas and estimated damage from those area's
health-problems.
At the top of the list was a paper from Geriatrics and Aging
I thought I heard this was the fastest growing population segment, so they are probably going to be holding first place for years to come!
Dave Briggs :~)
This list of paper titles is eerily similar to the list of winners of the IgNoble awards. I remember a few years ago a paper was published on country music and high suicide rates.