Biomedical subjects
V V Stanciu
Publications and source records attributed to V V Stanciu.
[An analysis of the articles published in Revista Medico-Chirurgicală over the last 7 years].
INTRODUCTION: As the number of medical journals is continuously increasing, their quality becomes a very reliable tool used by the editors in order to increase readership. As a consequence, the structure and the content of submitted papers are carefully revised before publication. OBJECTIVES: The purpose of our study is to describe structural aspects and the use of descriptive and inferential statistics methods in papers published by the Medical-Surgical Journal between 1990 and 1997. METHODS: Fifteen items were collected for each paper. Ten of them were related to the general structure: type of paper, number of authors, town of authors, professional environment, medical topic covered by the paper, pluridisciplinarity, the existence of a bibliography, the number of titles in the bibliography, language of publication, presence of abstract. The other five were related to data analysis and reporting: description of statistical methods, the existence of significant results without method description, presence of tables and graphics, use of descriptive and inferential statistics. RESULTS: A number of 477 papers were analysed. Original papers represented 57.4%, 71.5% of the authors were involved in medical/non-medical teaching, 58.3% of papers were related to clinical sciences, 29.8% were related to basic medical sciences; pluridisciplinarity was present in 26.8% of papers (significantly increasing trend, p < 0.01), the bibliography was not present in 27.3% of papers (significantly decreasing trend, p < 0.001), romanian was the language of publication in 83% of papers, followed by english (10.9%), french (4.6%) and german (1.5%). Papers without abstract represented 29.9%, the median number of authors is 3(range 1-15) and the mean number of titles in reference list 14.7(SD = 12). Eighteen papers (3.8%) reported significant results without description of methods, 51.4% used tables and graphics, 13.4% used descriptive statistics methods and only 6.9% of the papers have used inferential statistics methods. CONCLUSION: The structural problems of papers published in Medical Surgical Journal should be avoided using a more restrictive editorial policy. The use of such a policy shows positive results for the last 2 years (1995 and 1996). Statistical methods are poorly used in this Romanian medical journal and much progress is to be made before speaking about statistical assessment of submitted papers.