Everything about The Lancet totally explained
The Lancet is one of the oldest
peer-reviewed medical journals in the world, published weekly by
Elsevier, part of
Reed Elsevier. It was founded in
1823 by
Thomas Wakley, who named it after the surgical instrument called a
lancet, as well as an arched window ("to let in light").
The
present editor-in-chief is
Richard Horton.
The Lancet takes a stand on several important medical issues - recent examples include criticism of the
World Health Organization, rejecting the efficacy of
homeopathy as a therapeutic option and disapproval during the time Reed Exhibitions hosted
arms industry fairs.
Impact
The Lancet has a significant readership throughout the world with a high impact factor. It publishes original research articles, review articles ("seminars" and "reviews"), editorials, book reviews, correspondences, amidst other regulars such as news features and case reports. The Lancet is considered to be one of the "core" general medical journals, the others being the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and the British Medical Journal. The Lancet's impact factor is currently ranked #2 among general medical journals [ISIJournal Citation Reports].
Journals family
The Lancet has now given birth to a few sub-speciality journals, all bearing the parent title -
The Lancet Neurology (
neurology),
The Lancet Oncology (
oncology) and
The Lancet Infectious Diseases (
infectious diseases). All of them have established significant reputations as medical journals, though most started out publishing only review articles.
Volume renumbering
Prior to 1990,
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,
Lancet 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
Science Direct
uses this new numbering scheme.
Controversial articles
The Lancet was severely criticized after it published a paper in 1998, in which the authors linked the
MMR vaccine with
autism. In February 2004
The Lancet published a partial retraction of the paper (
Lancet 2004;363:750). Dr Horton went on the record to say the paper had "fatal conflicts of interest" because one of the authors had a serious conflict of interest that he hadn't declared to
The Lancet (External Link).
The Lancet published a controversial estimate of the Iraq war's Iraqi death toll--around one hundred thousand--in 2004. In 2006 a followup study by the same team suggested that the violent death rate in Iraq wasn't only consistent with the earlier estimate, but had increased considerably in the intervening period (
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. 1849 households that contained 12,801 people were surveyed.
(External Link)
In January 2006, it was revealed that data had been fabricated in an article by the Norwegian cancer researcher
Jon Sudbø and 13 co-authors published in
The Lancet in October 2005
(External Link). The fabricated article was entitled "Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and the risk of oral cancer: a nested case-control study".
(External Link). Within a week after this scandal surfaced in the news, the high-impact
New England Journal of Medicine published an expression of editorial concern regarding another research paper published on a similar topic in the journal.
Further Information
Get more info on 'The Lancet'.
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