This Week in BMJ | Editor's Choice | Press releases | Cover note

691 Multiple sclerosis, depression, and suicide
Anthony Feinstein

692 Growth hormone: panacea or punishment for short stature?
C G D Brook

693 Occipital plagiocephaly: an epidemic of craniosynostosis?
Barry M Jones, Richard Hayward, Robert Evans, Jonathan Britto

694 Child health promotion and its challenge to medical education
David Stone, Harry Campbell

695 The future of vascular services: the need for a strategy
John H N Wolfe

696 Authorship is dying: long live contributorship
Richard Smith

697 New Scottish parliament will focus on health
Thousands of mentally ill sterilised in France
BMA asks for 10% pay increase
Group will vet psychiatric hospital closures
Thalidomide ban to be lifted in the US
Spinal infection scare surrounds French clinic
Drug efficacy information must be given
Virus used to combat HIV infection
Vancomycin resistant Staphylococcus aureus
Calcium supplements reduce risk of fracture
Managed care not right for Europe
Dr Nafis Sadik profiled

703 Should we pay the patient? Review of financial incentives to enhance patient compliance
Antonio Giuffrida, David J Torgerson

708 Long term results of growth hormone treatment in France in children of short stature: population register based study
Joël Coste, Muriel Letrait, Jean Claude Carel, Jean Pierre Tresca, Pierre Chatelain, Pierre Rochiccioli, Jean Louis Chaussain, Jean Claude Job

713 Rising incidence of insulin dependent diabetes in children aged under 5 years in the Oxford region: time trend analysis
Stephen G Gardner, Polly J Bingley, Pamela A Sawtell, Suzanne Weeks, Edwin A M Gale, the Bart's-Oxford Study Group

717 Investigation into the increase in hay fever and eczema at age 16 observed between the 1958 and 1970 British birth cohorts
Barbara K Butland, David P Strachan, Sarah Lewis, John Bynner, Neville Butler, John Britton

722 Comparison of the prediction by 27 different factors of coronary heart disease and death in men and women of the Scottish heart health study: cohort study
Hugh Tunstall-Pedoe, Mark Woodward, Roger Tavendale, Richard A' Brook, Mary K McCluskey

730 Science, medicine, and the future: Malaria
Sanjeev Krishna

733 ABC of mental health: Psychological treatments
Phil Richardson

736 Should we screen for gestational diabetes?"The concept of gestational diabetes was popularised before considerations of evidence based medicine came on the scene"
R J Jarrett

The case for screening for gestational diabetes
Jacquiline de A C Soares, Anne Dornhorstt, Richard W Beard

740 How to read a paper: Papers that go beyond numbers (qualitative research)
Trisha Greenhalgh, Rod Taylor

744 Authorship
T Scott; J I Mann; M J Wareing; J Crammer; H J McQuay and R A Moore; P de Sa; T Boerma; A Ezsias; J-D Jia; H M Bichan; T Hall; M D Fetters and T S Elwyn; R K S Phillips; C Currie; K Chakravarty; B W Davies

748 General practice fundholding and health care costs
M Marum; N Mays; R V Millard; D Keeley

750 Guidelines on circumcision
J D Dalton; R G Buick

750 Warfarin use in patients with atrial fibrillation
D Sulch; S Bridger; M Sudlow and others

751 Title of news item on stillbirths was inaccurate
M J Dickson

751 Bitten - by taxonomy
T Wootton-Leeuwenburg

751 New logo
M J Platt; T Greenhalgh

752 G A D Gordon, B S Grant, J A H Henderson, S K M Jivani, A E B Matthews, S S Pavillard, A I Ross, H M Slack, T Venkateswarlu, J Watson, B Weinstein

Soundings

754 Better ads for healthier people
George Dunea

754 Breast feeding does not always work
Jenny Bennison

755 The Lost Art of Healing Bernard Lown
D J Weatherall

The Undertaking: Life Studies from a Dismal Trade Thomas Lynch
Anthony Clare

756

Editor's choice

Different kinds of truth

This week's journal offers several different kinds of truth. In opening the last article in her series on how to read a paper Trisha Greenhalgh and Rod Taylor contrast the approaches of quantitative and qualitative research (p 740). On the one hand, a finding is more likely to be accepted as a fact if it is expressed in numbers. On the other, qualitative researchers "seek a deeper truth": they aim to make sense of things in terms of the meanings people bring to them.

The problem of encouraging patients to comply with their treatment may seem ripe for qualitative research, but a paper this week offers instead a hard quantitative insight: that financial incentives work (p 703). In their systematic review of randomised controlled trials with quantitative data on the effect of financial incentives on compliance Antonio Giuffrida and David Torgerson found 11 small trials. Ten showed that financial incentives improved patient compliance. In the 11th the (non-financial) measure also worked, but it was more a stick than a carrot: parents were told that if they missed more than three successive appointments their child would go to the bottom of the waiting list.

Being named as the author of a research paper is often seen an incentive, as several of our letter writers point out (p 744). They are continuing the debate started in the BMJ and other journals about reforming the current messy system of authorship, and their letters cover the arguments: unfairness to junior workers, arrogation by senior ones, the need for researchers to gain authorship, and the need for readers to know who takes responsibility. The BMJ has decided to experiment with a "film credit" system of listing contributors and guarantors (p 702): we hope that authors will adopt this suggestion and help evolve a workable alternative to traditional authorship. Tim Scott, however, has a different view of the world. His deconstructionist analysis sees authorship as a way of staking out territorial rights and power (p 744). The authorship system probably accurately reflects power relations within scientific communities, and changing it will only "add another layer of obscurity to conceal its essentially political nature."

Finally, the book reviews offer yet another kind of view on the world (p 755). In reviewing Bernard Lown's The Lost Art of Healing, David Weatherall agrees with his lament for the loss of clinical wisdom, kindness, and pastoral care under a tide of technology, though he attributes it to different factors in Britain than in America: "No one can practice the healing art if they are always in a hurry." A related view emerges from the second book, written by a poet-undertaker. Anthony Clare describes it as "passionately written by a man lamenting a world so rich in technology that everything works better, even the people, but no one seems to know why."