Academic medicine: who is it for?: Funding gap between clinical and basic science publications is growing

doi:10.1136/bmj.330.7487.360-b

BMJ 2005;330:360-361 (12 February), doi:10.1136/bmj.330.7487.360-b

Letter

Academic medicine: who is it for?

Funding gap between clinical and basic science publications is growing

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR—The campaign to promote academic medicine representsan important effort to deal with the many challenges facinginternational clinical research.¹ Particularly, since this campaignis led by a group of academic publishers, asking if or how thesechallenges have been reflected in the biomedical literatureis worth while. To investigate this issue, we examined all 8.1million articles indexed in Medline between 1994 and 2001, comparingthree eras: 1978-85, 1986-93, and 1994-2001.

The proportion of studies including human subjects (the mostcommon proxy for clinical research) increased significantlyduring the study period from 62.6% to 68.8% (P < 0.001).While absolute rates of funding rose over time for both groups,they increased more rapidly for studies not involving humansubjects, leading to a widening funding gap between these papersand clinical manuscripts (table). By the final study era (1994-2001),more than two thirds of clinical publications . . . [Full text of this article]

Benjamin G Druss, Rosalynn Carter chair in mental health

Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, 1518 Clifton Road, NE Room 606, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA bdruss@emory.edu

Steven C Marcus, research associate professor

School of Social Work, University of Pennsylvania