National citation patterns of NEJM, The Lancet, JAMA and The BMJ in the lay press: a quantitative content analysis

Objectives: To analyse the total number of newspaper articles citing the four leading general medical journals and to describe national citation patterns.
Design: Quantitative content analysis
Setting/sample: Full text of 22 general newspapers in 14 countries over the period 2008-2015, collected from LexisNexis. The 14 countries have been categorized into four regions: US, UK, Western World (EU countries other than UK, and Australia, New Zealand and Canada) and Rest of the World (other countries).
Main outcome measure: Press citations of four medical journals (two American: NEJM and JAMA; and two British: The Lancet and The BMJ) in 22 newspapers.
Results: British and American newspapers cited some of the four analysed medical journals about three times a week in 2008-2015 (weekly mean 3.2 and 2.7 citations respectively); the newspapers from other Western countries did so about once a week (weekly mean 1.1), and those from the Rest of the World cited them about once a month (monthly ...