The Lay Press in the Transmission of Medical Knowledge

To the Editor: At least five hypotheses that were not discussed in the article of Phillips et al. (Oct. 17 issue) 1 could explain their results. To address the first three of them would require little or no new data collection. (1) The "slow months" hypothesis. It may be that The New York Times poorly "amplifies the transmission of medical information from the scientific literature to the research community" from August through November each year. The authors could compare citations to articles published in these four months in 1979 with citations to articles published in the other eight months. (2) The . . .