In today’s Plos One, is a neat paper on the Differences in the Volume of Pharmaceutical Advertisements between Print General Medical Journals
I know some of the folk who did this study, and have to say it is one of those pieces of Clin Epi that is thought provoking and worth a read.
What they did is take a sample of the top 6 general medical journals, in the US, Canada and the UK, between 2007 and 2012, and looked for the number of advertisements. They sampled the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ), Canadian Family Physician (CFP), Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), British Medical Journal (BMJ), and the Lancet.
They then estimated the revenue based on how much each journal charged compared to the number of adverts .
What they found is that, the Canadian journal were pretty heavy advertisers. The CMAJ had a mean of 18.72 ads per volume, compared to 0.25 in the Lancet. Given most of the authors were Canadian; I guess they had been wondering what’s the point of reading all these advertisements for some time.
The Pharmaceutical advertising revenue ranged from £0.025 to £3.8 million of yearly revenue, which equates to a saving for individual subscribers between 2 pence and £3.56 per issue.
Therefore, are you willing to pay more for your next medical journal, or are you happy to go along with all of those adverts?