Abbreviated title (ISO 4) Med. J. Aust. Language English | Discipline Medicine Publication history 1914-present | |
Edited by Professor Nicholas Talley Publisher Australasian Medical Publishing Company (Australia) | ||
The Medical Journal of Australia is a peer-reviewed medical journal. It is the official journal of the Australian Medical Association, published by the Australasian Medical Publishing Company. One of its early owners was editor Isaac Aaron.
Contents
The journal publishes editorials, original articles, case reports, and letters. The full text of every issue since January 2002 is available on the journal's internet site.
Abstracting and indexing
According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal has a 2014 impact factor of 4.089.
Elsevier
Professor Stephen Leeder, formerly the journal's editor-in-chief, was suddenly removed after criticizing the decision to outsource production of the journal to the global publishing giant Elsevier. All but one of the AMJ's editorial advisory committee resigned following the decision to sack Leeder, and wrote to AMA president Brian Owler asking him to review the decision.
At a 2009 court case in Australia where Merck & Co. was being sued by a user of Vioxx, the plaintiff alleged that Merck had paid Elsevier to publish the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, which had the appearance of being a peer-reviewed academic journal but in fact contained only articles favourable to Merck drugs. Merck has described the journal as a "complimentary publication", denied claims that articles within it were ghost written by Merck, and stated that the articles were all reprinted from peer-reviewed medical journals. In May 2009, Elsevier Health Sciences CEO Hansen released a statement regarding Australia-based sponsored journals, conceding that these were "sponsored article compilation publications, on behalf of pharmaceutical clients, that were made to look like journals and lacked the proper disclosures." The statement acknowledged that this "was an unacceptable practice."