The Lancet

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The Lancet
The Lancet cover, 2 March 2019.jpg
Cover of Volume 393, 2 March 2019
DisciplineMedicine
LanguageEnglish
Edited byRichard Horton
Publication details
History1823–present
Publisher
Elsevier (United Kingdom)
FrequencyWeekly
Delayed
59.102 (2018)
Standard abbreviations
ISO 4Lancet
Indexing
CODENLANCAO
ISSN0140-6736 (print)
1474-547X (web)
LCCNsf82002015
OCLC no.01755507
Links

The Lancet is a weekly peer-reviewed general medical journal. It is among the world's oldest and best-known general medical journals.[1][2] It was founded in 1823 by Thomas Wakley, an English surgeon who named it after the surgical instrument called a lancet (scalpel).[3]

The journal publishes original research articles, review articles ("seminars" and "reviews"), editorials, book reviews, correspondence, as well as news features and case reports. The Lancet has been owned by Elsevier since 1991, and its editor-in-chief since 1995 is Richard Horton.[4] The journal has editorial offices in London, New York, and Beijing.

History[]

The Lancet was founded in 1823 by Thomas Wakley, an English surgeon who named it after the surgical instrument called a lancet (scalpel).[3] Members of the Wakley family retained editorship of the journal until 1908.[5] In 1921, The Lancet was acquired by Hodder & Stoughton. Elsevier acquired The Lancet from Hodder & Stoughton in 1991.[6]

Impact[]

According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal has a 2018 impact factor of 59.102, ranking it second after The New England Journal of Medicine in the category "Medicine, General & Internal".[7]

Specialty journals[]

The Lancet also publishes several specialty journals: The Lancet Neurology (neurology), The Lancet Oncology (oncology), The Lancet Infectious Diseases (infectious diseases), The Lancet Respiratory Medicine (respiratory medicine), The Lancet Psychiatry (psychiatry), The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology (endocrinology), and The Lancet Gastroenterology & Hepatology (Gastroenterology) all of which publish original research and reviews. In 2013, The Lancet Global Health (global health) became the group's first fully open access journal. In 2014, The Lancet Haematology (haematology) and The Lancet HIV (infectious diseases) were launched, both as online only research titles. The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health (paediatrics) launched in 2017. The three established speciality journals (The Lancet Neurology, The Lancet Oncology, and The Lancet Infectious Diseases) have built up strong reputations in their medical speciality. According to the Journal Citation Reports, The Lancet Oncology has a 2017 impact factor of 36.421, The Lancet Neurology has 27.144, and The Lancet Infectious Diseases has 25.148.[7] There is also an online website for students entitled The Lancet Student in blog format, launched in 2007.

Since July 2018 The Lancet also publishes 2 new open access journals: EBioMedicine (translational research), a journal initially launched in 2014 by parent publisher Elsevier, since 2015 supported by Cell Press and The Lancet, and eventually (July 2018) incorporated in The Lancet family journals together with its newly incepted sister journal EClinicalMedicine (clinical research and ).

Specialty journal Commissions[]

Occasionally, the Editors of the specialty journals will feel it incumbent upon themselves to name Commissions about a certain particular issue of concern to a wide sub-audience of their readers. One example of this type of Commission is the Lancet Infectious Diseases Commission on "Preparedness for emerging epidemic threats", which reported on its mandate in January 2020.[8]

Volume renumbering[]

Prior to 1990, The Lancet had volume numbering that reset every year. Issues in January to June were in volume i, with the rest in volume ii. In 1990, the journal moved to a sequential volume numbering scheme, with two volumes per year. Volumes were retro-actively assigned to the years prior to 1990, with the first issue of 1990 being assigned volume 335, and the last issue of 1989 assigned volume 334. The table of contents listing on ScienceDirect uses this new numbering scheme.[9]

Political controversies[]

The Lancet has taken a political stand on several important medical and non-medical issues.[10] Recent examples include criticism of the World Health Organization (WHO), rejection of a draft WHO report on the efficacy of homeopathy as a therapeutic option,[11] disapproval during the time Reed Exhibitions (a division of Reed Elsevier) hosted arms industry fairs, a call in 2003 for tobacco to be made illegal in the United Kingdom,[12] and a call for an independent investigation into the American bombing of a hospital in Afghanistan in 2015.[13]

Tobacco ban proposal (2003)[]

A December 2003 editorial by the journal, titled "How do you sleep at night, Mr Blair?", called for tobacco use to be completely banned in the United Kingdom.[12] The Royal College of Physicians rejected their argument. John Britton, chairman of the college's tobacco advisory group, praised the journal for discussing the health problem, but he concluded that a "ban on tobacco would be a nightmare." Amanda Sandford, spokesperson for the anti-tobacco group Action on Smoking and Health, stated that criminalising a behaviour 26% of the population commit "is ludicrous." She also said: "We can't turn the clock back. If tobacco were banned we would have 13 million people desperately craving a drug that they would not be able to get." The deputy editor of The Lancet responded to the criticism by arguing that no other measures besides a total ban would likely be able to reduce tobacco use.[14]

The smokers rights group FOREST stated that the editorial gave them "amusement and disbelief". Director Simon Clark called the journal "fascist" and argued that it is hypocritical to ban tobacco while allowing unhealthy junk foods, alcohol consumption, and participation in extreme sports. Health Secretary John Reid reiterated that his government was committed to helping people give up smoking. He added: "Despite the fact that this is a serious problem, it is a little bit extreme for us in Britain to start locking people up because they have an ounce of tobacco somewhere."[15]

Iraq War death toll estimates[]

The Lancet also published an estimate of the Iraq War's Iraqi death toll—around 100,000—in 2004. In 2006, a follow-up study by the same team suggested that the violent death rate in Iraq was not only consistent with the earlier estimate, but had increased considerably in the intervening period (see Lancet surveys of casualties of the Iraq War). The second survey estimated that there had been 654,965 excess Iraqi deaths as a consequence of the war. The 95% confidence interval was 392,979 to 942,636. 1,849 households that contained 12,801 people were surveyed.[16]

The estimates provided in the second article are much higher than those published in other surveys from the same time. Most notably, the "Iraq Family Health Survey" published in the New England Journal of Medicine surveyed 9,345 households across Iraq and estimated 151,000 deaths due to violence (95% uncertainty range, 104,000 to 223,000) over the same period covered in the second Lancet survey by Burnham et al. The NEJM article stated that the second Lancet survey "considerably overestimated the number of violent deaths" and said the Lancet results were "highly improbable, given the internal and external consistency of the data and the much larger sample size and quality-control measures taken in the implementation of the IFHS."[citation needed]

Open letter for the people of Gaza (2014)[]

In August 2014 and during the 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict, The Lancet published an "Open letter for the people of Gaza" in their correspondence section.[17] As reported in The Daily Telegraph, the letter "condemned Israel in the strongest possible terms, but strikingly made no mention of Hamas' atrocities."[18] According to Haaretz, the authors of the letter include doctors who "are apparently sympathetic to the views of David Duke, a white supremacist and former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard."[19] One of the doctors responded by saying that the letter was a legitimate exercise in freedom of expression, while a second one stated that he had no knowledge about David Duke or the Ku Klux Klan.[18]

The editor of The Lancet, Richard Horton, said: "I have no plans to retract the letter, and I would not retract the letter even if it was found to be substantiated."[19] However, Horton subsequently came to Israel's Rambam Hospital for a visit and said that he "deeply, deeply regret[ted] the completely unnecessary polarization that publication of the letter by Paola Manduca caused."[20][21][22][23]

Mark Pepys, a member of the Jewish Medical Association, criticised the letter as being a "partisan political diatribe" which was inappropriate for a serious publication. In addition, Pepys accused Richard Horton personally for allowing the publication of such political views.[18]

February 2020 letter dismissing lab-leak theory[]

On February 19, 2020, the Lancet published a letter signed by 27 scientists that stated: "We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin...and overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife,” adding: "Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumours, and prejudice that jeopardise our global collaboration in the fight against this virus." The letter has been criticized for having a chilling effect on scientific research and the scientific community by implying that scientists who "bring up the lab-leak theory...are doing the work of conspiracy theorists";[24][25][26] the statement was deemed to have "effectively ended the debate over COVID-19’s origins before it began".[25] Further criticism of the letter was focused on the fact that, according to emails obtained through FOIA, members involved in producing the letter concealed their involvement "to creat[e] the impression of scientific unanimity" and failed to disclose conflicts of interest.[25]

Retracted papers and scientific controversies[]

Andrew Wakefield and the MMR vaccine (1998)[]

The Lancet was criticised after it published a paper in 1998 in which the authors suggested a link between the MMR vaccine and autism spectrum disorder.[27] In February 2004, The Lancet published a statement by 10 of the paper's 13 coauthors repudiating the possibility that MMR could cause autism.[28] The editor-in-chief, Richard Horton, went on the record to say the paper had "fatal conflicts of interest" because the study's lead author, Andrew Wakefield, had a serious conflict of interest that he had not declared to The Lancet.[29] The journal completely retracted the paper on 2 February 2010, after Wakefield was found to have acted unethically in conducting the research.[30]

The Lancet's six editors, including the editor-in-chief, were also criticised in 2011 because they had "covered up" the "Wakefield concocted fear of MMR" with an "avalanche of denials" in 2004.[31]


PACE study (2011)[]

In 2011, The Lancet published a study by the UK-based "PACE trial management group", which reported success with graded exercise therapy and cognitive behavioural therapy for chronic fatigue syndrome;[32] a follow-up study was published in Lancet Psychiatry in 2015.[33] The studies attracted criticism from some patients and researchers, especially with regard to data analysis that was different from that described in the original protocol.[34] In a 2015 Slate article, biostatistician Bruce Levin of Columbia University was quoted saying "The Lancet needs to stop circling the wagons and be open", and that "one of the tenets of good science is transparency"; while Ronald Davis of Stanford University said: "the Lancet should step up to the plate and pull that paper".[34] Horton defended The Lancet's publication of the trial and called the critics: "a fairly small, but highly organized, very vocal and very damaging group of individuals who have, I would say, actually hijacked this agenda and distorted the debate so that it actually harms the overwhelming majority of patients."[34]

Starting in 2011, critics of the studies filed Freedom of Information Act requests to get access to the authors' primary data, in order to learn what the trial's results would have been under the original protocol. In 2016, some of the data was released, which allowed calculation of results based on the original protocol and found that additional treatment led to no significant improvement in recovery rates over the control condition.[35][36]

List of editors[]

The following persons have been editors-in-chief of the journal:

See also[]

References[]

  1. ^ "Prestigious Medical Journal, The Lancet, Issues Family Planning Series". Population Media Center. 13 July 2012. Retrieved 4 March 2014.
  2. ^ "Scholar Metrics: Top Publications". Google Scholar.
  3. ^ Jump up to: a b "About the Lancet". Retrieved 23 April 2020.
  4. ^ "People at The Lancet". The Lancet. Retrieved 14 November 2018.
  5. ^ Kandela, Peter (3 October 1998). "The editors". The Lancet. 352 (9134): 1141–1143. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(98)08337-8. ISSN 0140-6736. Retrieved 8 August 2021.
  6. ^ SNODDY, RAYMOND (24 October 1991). "The Lancet is sold to Elsevier". Financial Times (London,England).
  7. ^ Jump up to: a b "Journals Ranked by Impact: Medicine, General". 2018 Journal Citation Reports. Web of Science (Science ed.). Clarivate Analytics. 2018.
  8. ^ Lee, Vernon J.; et al. (2020). "Preparedness for emerging epidemic threats: A Lancet Infectious Diseases Commission". The Lancet Infectious Diseases. 20 (1): 17–19. doi:10.1016/S1473-3099(19)30674-7. PMC 7158988. PMID 31876487.
  9. ^ The Lancet. Science Direct.
  10. ^ "Is the Lancet becoming too political?". www.spectator.co.uk. Retrieved 12 September 2020.
  11. ^ "Homoeopathy's benefit questioned". BBC News. 26 August 2005. Archived from the original on 15 May 2018.
  12. ^ Jump up to: a b Ferriman A (2003). "Lancet calls for tobacco to be made illegal". BMJ. 327 (7428): 1364. doi:10.1136/bmj.327.7428.1364-b. PMC 293016.
  13. ^ What are the Geneva Conventions for?, editorial, The Lancet, vol. 386, no. 10003, p. 1510, 17 October 2015
  14. ^ Laurance, Jeremy (5 December 2003). "Lancet calls for tobacco ban to save thousands of lives". The Independent. Archived from the original on 6 June 2011. Retrieved 18 January 2010.
  15. ^ "UK ministers urged to ban tobacco". BBC News. 5 December 2003. Archived from the original on 10 April 2016. Retrieved 18 January 2010.
  16. ^ Coghlan, Ben (30 October 2006). "Gut reaction aside, those on the ground know Iraq reality". Eureka Street. Archived from the original on 28 May 2018.
  17. ^ Manduca, Paolo; et al. (2014). "An open letter for the people in Gaza". The Lancet. 384 (9941): 397–398. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(14)61044-8. PMID 25064592. S2CID 4672171. Retrieved 1 February 2017.
  18. ^ Jump up to: a b c Simons, Jake Wallis (22 September 2014). "Lancet 'hijacked in anti-Israel campaign'". The Daily Telegraph. London. Archived from the original on 23 February 2018. Retrieved 2 October 2014.
  19. ^ Jump up to: a b "British medical journal refuses to retract 'letter to Gaza' by anti-Semitic activists". Haaretz. Tel Aviv. 22 September 2014. Archived from the original on 21 January 2015. Retrieved 2 October 2014.
  20. ^ Lazareva, Inna (3 October 2014). "Lancet editor apologises for Gaza article by scientists who promoted Ku Klux Klan". The Daily Telegraph. London. Archived from the original on 25 May 2018. Retrieved 5 October 2014.
  21. ^ "In Israel, Lancet editor regrets publishing open letter on Gaza". Haaretz. Tel Aviv. Jewish Telegraphic Agency. 3 October 2014. Archived from the original on 26 June 2018. Retrieved 5 October 2014.
  22. ^ Siegel-Itzkovich, Judy (2 October 2014). "The Lancet editor relents on medical journal's unbalanced attacks on Israel". The Jerusalem Post. Archived from the original on 28 May 2015. Retrieved 5 October 2014.
  23. ^ "Lancet editor in editorial regrets, but does not retract, Gaza letter". Jewish Telegraphic Agency. 12 October 2014. Archived from the original on 12 October 2019.
  24. ^ "Did COVID-19 Leak From A Lab? A Reporter Investigates — And Finds Roadblocks". NPR.org. Retrieved 19 June 2021.
  25. ^ Jump up to: a b c Eban, Katherine. "The Lab-Leak Theory: Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19's Origins". Vanity Fair. Retrieved 19 June 2021.
  26. ^ Lonas, Lexi (9 June 2021). "WHO adviser accuses COVID-19 lab-leak theory critics of 'thuggery'". TheHill. Retrieved 19 June 2021.
  27. ^ Lyall J (2004). "Editor in the eye of a storm". British Medical Journal. 328 (7438): 528. doi:10.1136/bmj.328.7438.528. PMC 351866. PMID 15164721.
  28. ^ Murch SH, Anthony A, Casson DH, Malik M, Berelowitz M, Dhillon AP, Thomson MA, Valentine A, Davies SE, Walker-Smith JA (March 2004). "Retraction of an interpretation". Lancet. 363 (9411): 750. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(04)15715-2. PMID 15016483. S2CID 5128036.
  29. ^ "MMR researchers issue retraction". BBC News. 4 March 2004. Archived from the original on 12 April 2016.
  30. ^ Park, Madison (2 February 2010). "Medical journal retracts study linking autism to vaccine". CNN. Archived from the original on 27 May 2013.
  31. ^ Deer, Brian (19 January 2011). "The Lancet's two days to bury bad news". Archived from the original on 23 February 2014. Retrieved 18 November 2014. Were it not for the GMC case, which cost a rumored £6m (€7m; $9m), the fraud by which Wakefield concocted fear of MMR would forever have been denied and covered up.
  32. ^ White PD, et al. (2011). "Comparison of adaptive pacing therapy, cognitive behaviour therapy, graded exercise therapy, and specialist medical care for chronic fatigue syndrome (PACE): a randomised trial". The Lancet. 377 (9768): 823–836. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(11)60096-2. PMC 3065633. PMID 21334061.
  33. ^ Sharpe, M; Goldsmith, KA; Johnson, AL; Chalder, T; Walker, J; White, PD (December 2015). "Rehabilitative treatments for chronic fatigue syndrome: long-term follow-up from the PACE trial" (PDF). The Lancet Psychiatry. 2 (12): 1067–74. doi:10.1016/s2215-0366(15)00317-x. PMID 26521770.
  34. ^ Jump up to: a b c Rehmeyer, Julie (13 November 2015). "Hope for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: The debate over this mysterious disease is suddenly shifting". Slate. Archived from the original on 15 August 2019.
  35. ^ Wilshire, C; Kindlon, T; Matthees, A; McGrath, S (2016). "Can patients with chronic fatigue syndrome really recover after graded exercise or cognitive behavioural therapy? A critical commentary and preliminary re-analysis of the PACE trial". Fatigue: Biomedicine, Health & Behavior. 5 (1): 43–56. doi:10.1080/21641846.2017.1259724.
  36. ^ Rehmeyer, Julie; Tuller, David (18 March 2017). "Getting It Wrong on Chronic Fatigue Syndrome". The New York Times (editorial). Archived from the original on 28 October 2019.

External links[]

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