The end of practice-based research?

摘要

Recently, McWhinney1 has stated that there is little being published in the journals of family medicine and general practice concerning clinical insight and discovery. In particular, he has deplored the lack of clinical research carried out by single practitioners working with their own patients. As one who first joined the Royal College of General Practitioners in 1968, I was interested to discover whether this criticism applied to the BJGP and whether the approach to the publication of research had changed over 40 years. I therefore surveyed the journal over 6-months from January to June 2008 and compared the research content with that published in the same months of 1968. I was careful to exclude reviews and lectures (Table 1).