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The State Of Primary-Care Research, David Mant, Chris Del Mar, Paul Glasziou, Andre Knottnerus, Paul Wallace, Chris Van Weel

Paul Glasziou

In March, 2003, the editor of The Lancet attended an international conference in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, on primary-care research, subsequently running a rather dyspeptic editorial entitled "Is primary-care research a lost cause?" (1) This article highlighted the unacceptable weakness of primary-care research worldwide. A particular concern of the conference was the shortage of primary care research in less economically developed countries to inform the clinical and public health management of malnutrition, malaria, AIDS, water-borne infection, and other illnesses of poverty (2). However, problems exist even in economically developed countries. In Australia, for example, a crude measure of research productivity with …