The Evolving Roles of the Medical Journal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Launched in 1812, the New England Journal of Medicine and Surgery and the Collateral Branches of Science was a latecomer to medical publishing in the new republic: medical journals had already been established in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore.The first issue included essays on clinical problems, reviews of general progress in the sciences, a celebration of Francois Xavier Bichat, and an account of an effort to decipher a secret French remedy for gout.Initially published quarterly, the Journal merged in 1828 with the Boston Medical Intelligencer to become the weekly Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, a name it kept for a century.Survival was a challenge.As prominent journals struggled and folded during the Civil War, the Journal asked readers for financial support and submissions "which will show that the light of pure medical science still burns among us undimmed by the heavy clouds of national trial and adversity" (1864; see box for cited Journal articles).Throughout the century, hundreds of new journals appeared, as medical societies, medical colleges, and therapeutic sects planted their flags.In 1879, the same year he established the Index Medicus to tame the growing medical literature, Surgeon General John Shaw Billings complained that "it is as useless to advise a man not to start a new journal as it is to advise him not to commit suicide" (1879a).By 1882, nearly three quarters of the 509 journals founded in the United States since 1797 had reportedly "passed over to the silent land."
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.096 | 0.150 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.042 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.061 | 0.035 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.015 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.006 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".