A research team headed by Sargent probed children’s responses to televised fast-food ads. The study tested Children’s Advertising Review Unit (CARU) advertising self-regulation guidelines, in which the Better Business Bureau “evaluates child-directed advertising and promotional material in all media to advance truthfulness, accuracy and consistency with its Self-Regulatory Program for Children’...

The only trouble with Richard Smith, for 13 years Editor of the British Medical Journal, is that he writes well but tends to repeat himself. Editors, and ex-editors, are a small group in the medical world, but we like to think we have been influential. This book is a series of stories of Richard Smith’s interaction with prospective authors, medical researchers of all sorts, the authorities of t...

Medical journals, which many imagine to be as dull as telephone directories and twice as obscure, influence the lives of everybody—and not always for the better. Not only do they affect how doctors treat patients and the actions taken by public health authorities, they also influence how we think about birth, death, pain, and sickness. It may therefore make sense for you—the thoughtful but not ...

This review covers recent publications on the motor system (orthopedics and movement) in Brazilian journals recently admitted to the ISI-Thomson Journal of Citations Index. Two of these are still pleading for admission into PubMed which will eventually enhance their global visibility. We offer this contribution to experts on these areas who are regular readers of Revista da Associação Médica Br...

This paper reviews the difficulties associated with being a statistical reviewer for a medical journal. As background, I consider first the use of statistical reviewers by medical journals, medical journals' policies on statistical peer review, and the limited evidence of its effectiveness. The assessment of a manuscript is considered under the headings of design, methods of analysis, presentat...

Providing a perfect instruction to authors can prevent most potential publication ethics errors. This study was conducted to determine the quality of ethical considerations in the instructions to the authors of Iranian research scientific journals of medical sciences (accredited by the Commission for Accreditation and Improvement of Iranian Medical Journals) in October 2011. Checklist items (n=...

The editorial materials in top medical and public health journals are opportunities for experts to offer thoughts that might influence the trajectory of the field. To date, while some studies have examined gender bias in the publication of editorial materials in medical journals, none have studied public health journals. In this perspective, we studied the gender ratio ...

This edited book provides a very useful series of chapters relating to the development of arterial and heart disease in diabetics. Atherosclerosis is widely recognised to be the major killer in Type I and Type II diabetic patients, but there are few comprehensive reviews of the background data and this book fills a niche. Robert Stout has been joined by colleagues in Belfast who cover the patho...

In the Philadelphia Medical Journal for March there is an article by John M Swan, m.d., of Philadelphia, giving a review of the recent literature on the intercommunicability of human and bovine tuberculosis He divides the paper into two classes : (I) Those giving proof of the transmissibility of human tuberculosis to animals, II) Those showing that bovine tuberculosis is transmissible to man. l...