How do we know, what do we know and what can knowledge do? From John Brownlee to translational medicine

At our recent annual associate editors meeting we discussed whether the IJE should follow most other general medical and leading epidemiology journals in releasing press releases to publicise particular papers. One associate editor (not a natural media tart or self-publicist) is enthusiastic about press releases, and thinks that the IJE may not be helping authors’ careers and their institutional standing in not routinely engaging in promotion of the material appearing in its pages. Receiving coverage in the popular press certainly increases the citations in the scientific literature that a paper receives, as demonstrated by the study showing that scientific papers covered in the New York Times were cited considerably more often in the subsequent 10 years than papers not covered in the New York Times. 1 The particularly elegant aspect of this study was that during a 3 month strike at the New York Times the paper was not released to the public, but an ‘‘edition of record’’ was still produced by the journalists; receiving coverage in the newspaper during this period was not associated with increased citations, indicating that it was not simply that the New York Times reported on the papers that would in any case have been cited more often.