What has been published in the Journal during the last three years?

On our website (http://www.sjphc.org) we state:

The main mission of the Journal is to publish original, peer-reviewed research on topics related to general practice and primary care. We also publish editorials, discussion papers and reviews to facilitate continuing professional development in family medicine.

Now, the questions are: Have we been successful in fulfilling our mission during the last three years? Have the articles been mainly clinical or epidemiological? Have the methods used been quantitative or qualitative? And from which countries have the articles come?

To find the answers I searched the last three volumes of our Journal (2004, 2005, and 2006), and, for the five Nordic countries, I also searched our files of incoming articles (for the calendar years 2004 and 2005). For the five countries I finally related the number of articles to the number of GPs working in each country [1].

The main results are shown in Table I. In the upper part you can see that we published a total of 108 original articles during 2004–2006; that is, nine per issue. Most articles were written by researchers from Sweden (44; 41%), followed by Finland (15 articles), Norway (15), Denmark (14), and The Netherlands (10).

Table I.  Original articles, published in the Scandinavian Journal of Primary Health Care during the years 2004–2006 (volumes 22–24), distributed according to country of origin (upper part). Original articles submitted from the five Nordic countries during the calendar years 2004 and 2005, and eventually published (during 2004–2007), distributed according to country of origin (lower part).

	Denmark	Finland	Iceland	Norway	Sweden	Rest of Europe	Rest of the world
Published articles (2004–2006)
No (%)	14 (13)	15 (14)	3 (3)	15 (14)	44 (41)	15 (14)	2 (2)
Articles/1000 GPs/year	1.2	1.0	5.1	2.2	3.0
Incoming articles (2004 and 2005)
No (%)	13 (8)	24 (15)	6 (4)	23 (15)	92 (58)
Articles/1000 GPs/year	1.7	2.5	15.3	5.1	9.4
Eventually published
No (%)	8 (12)	8(12)	3(4)	14 (21)	34 (51)
Arts/1000 GPs/year	1.0	0.8	7.7	3.1	3.5
Percentage published (of incoming)	62	33	50	61	37

Additionally, in each issue we published 1–2 editorials (usually one written by the editorial board and one by the owners of the Journal, namely the national colleges/societies of general practice in the Nordic countries), as well as one special article aiming to contribute to the professional development of our specialty (for details, please see references [2–13]!).

Of the 108 original articles, 58 (54%) were judged to be mainly clinical, while the rest (50; 46%) were mainly epidemiological. Most of the articles used (mainly) quantitative research methods (88; 81%), while the rest used qualitative methods (20; 19%).

The lower part of Table I shows that 158 articles were submitted to the editorial office from the Nordic countries during 2004 and 2005, 67 (42%) of which were eventually published during 2004–2007 (and the rest rejected). Of the Danish and Norwegian articles barely two-thirds were accepted for publication, while the corresponding figure for Finnish and Swedish articles was a good one-third.

The number of published articles per 1000 general practitioners, for each one of the five Nordic countries, can also be seen in Table I. The figures in the upper part (calculated according to articles published during a three-year period) are (of course) comparable to the figures in the lower part (calculated according to articles submitted to the editorial office during a two-year period). Thus, primary care researchers seem to be more active in Sweden and Norway compared with Finland and Denmark (of course, Icelandic researchers seem to be the most active, but here the number of articles is the lowest).

After this thorough examination, what are my answers? Well, I think that during the last three years we have published quite a good mixture of clinical and epidemiological articles, relevant to primary healthcare, and using mostly quantitative but also qualitative methods. The original articles have come from many countries, mostly the Nordic, and we have furthermore published some special articles aimed at developing our speciality.

During our editorial meetings we have already discussed whether it is appropriate to reject more articles coming from Finland and Sweden compared with articles from Norway and Denmark, and that discussion must go on. It may be that we receive from Sweden more articles that are outside the scope of the Journal, and the high number of incoming Swedish articles may indicate that.

In an earlier article [10] based on Pub Med searches we found that in 2003 the total number of primary care publications per 1000 general practitioners was 25.1 for Norway, 21.1 for Sweden, 13.0 for Denmark, and 7.6 for Finland. Supposing these figures are valid also for the period 2004–2006, then the yearly publications in our Journal constitute 9%, 14%, 9%, and 13%, respectively, of the total number of primary care publications for these countries.

Thus, even if our Journal is owned by the Nordic colleges/societies of general practice, it is but one of the journals where Nordic primary care professionals publish their scientific articles. However, while many articles on various aspects of specific diseases, for example diabetes and hypertension, are published in specialized journals, more articles on the (sometimes soft but probably more important) core aspects of our speciality are published in the Scandinavian Journal of Primary Health Care. Anders Håkansson Professor Department of Clinical Sciences, Malmö General Practice/Family Medicine Lund University Malmö University Hospital Malmö, Sweden E-mail: [email protected]