Scope
Public health journals often indicate their target audience as being interdisciplinary, including health care professionals, public health decision-makers and researchers. A main objective is to support evidence-based policy and evidence-based practice in public health. In contrast, medical journals (e.g. The Lancet) typically focus on reaching medical professionals as their main audience, although the boundaries between these two categories is increasingly blurry.
It has been argued that some medical and public health journals are "filled with increasingly complex science" which depends upon advanced statistics and research methods that health care providers may have difficulty understanding. In response they have turned towards publishing "articles that are more journalism than science" such as reviews, news, and educational material. However, science is what attracts major attention and leads institutions and libraries to purchase subscriptions.
Read more about this topic: Public Health Journal
Famous quotes containing the word scope:
“For it is not the bare words but the scope of the writer that gives the true light, by which any writing is to be interpreted; and they that insist upon single texts, without considering the main design, can derive no thing from them clearly.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)
“Happy is that mother whose ability to help her children continues on from babyhood and manhood into maturity. Blessed is the son who need not leave his mother at the threshold of the world’s activities, but may always and everywhere have her blessing and her help. Thrice blessed are the son and the mother between whom there exists an association not only physical and affectional, but spiritual and intellectual, and broad and wise as is the scope of each being.”
—Lydia Hoyt Farmer (1842–1903)