Physicians: Are Medical Journals Still Relevant?

Many physicians have asked are medical journals still relevant. Advances in technology have meant that information is disseminated more broadly and isn’t just localized in medical journals anymore. What’s more, some medical journals have been sources of scandal, when it’s turned out that their information wasn’t as meticulously reviewed as they claimed.

As an up-and-coming medical professional, read on to learn about if it’s worth your while to subscribe to and keep up with medical journals.

The Advantage of Peer-Reviewed Journals
First, it’s important to point out that most academic journals aren’t like other media. Unlike blog posts, newspaper articles and so forth, a journal is peer-reviewed and therefore held to a stringent factual standard. If you have any questions, it’s generally best to seek out a peer-reviewed journal first.

That being said, not all journals are held to the same stringent standards, and there have been recent controversies about academic and medical journals that are very free about what they publish. Always check a journal’s credentials before you take it seriously, and look at factors like the size of a study, and who funded it.

Don’t (Necessarily) Trust Vendors
One issue that’s received increased attention from patient advocacy groups in recent years has been the power that representatives from drug and device companies have over physicians. It’s no mystery that especially for some specialties of medicine, doctors get plenty of freebies from companies and their representatives. Advocacy groups usually focus on things like vacations, fancy dinners and so forth, but it’s much more common that physicians receive information about the drug from the representative. While this doesn’t have the glamour of a trip to Tahiti, it can do just as good of a job of encouraging a busy doctor to prescribe the company’s drug or device.

Obviously, the FDA wouldn’t allow a drug to be put on the market if it weren’t safe. But especially if you’re considering off-label uses for a medication, or you aren’t sure if it’ll benefit your patients, it’s a good idea to get information from a source you know is unbiased. Going to a peer-reviewed medical journal for information about drug trials and other data will give you much more reliable information than you’d get by going off the company’s word alone.

Your Field Matters
Consider your field carefully when deciding if you need to subscribe to a medical journal. If you’re in a cutting-edge field where you need to keep up with current developments, then you may need to maintain a subscription to one or more major general journals.

But if you’re in a field where you work based on an established, time-tested basis of medical knowledge (such as many general practitioners), you may not need to keep up a subscription to a journal. If you have a patient with special needs, or if there’s some new and pressing medical development, then you can simply purchase articles as needed (or as you’re curious) through many online vendors.

Conclusion
Not all physicians need to keep up a subscription to a medical journal, these days. There’s plenty of information freely available online. However, depending on your scope of practice, you may be more interested in following developments in medical journals than other practitioners are.

Finally, if you ever find yourself in need of a specific piece of knowledge, don’t forget that you can buy individual articles online, as needed, without purchasing a whole journal. By keeping abreast of developments in your subfield generally, you can make determinations about what individual articles you need to read, rather than bogging yourself down with reading all relevant journals.

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