Excessive and disproportionate advertising in peer-reviewed journals

The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) has outlined ethical guidelines concerning the advertising practices of peer-reviewed journals that briefly discuss issues of excessive and disproportionate advertising. The authors evaluated these guidelines using quantitative data, assessing the types and frequencies of advertising in 2001 print issues of NEJM and JAMA, two principal members of ICMJE. Advertising ratios (ratio of advertisements to editorial content) were near unity in NEJM and 0.30 in JAMA, compared with reported ratios of 0.15 among low-circulation specialty science journals and 0.80 among high-circulation consumer magazines. In both journals, five corporations placed more than 50% of all display advertisements. The findings suggest a dissonance between the ethical guidelines and the de facto advertising practices of arguably the two most important member journals of the ICMJE. There is a need to define and apply standards for excessive and disproportionate advertising.