> Also, medical journals are
> increasingly dependent on advertising revenue from drug companies,
> which results in a disincentive to publish negative results.
A related story: Back in the late 1990s I worked for Science magazine. It is widely known as the most prestigious multidisciplinary science magazine published in the U.S. Science had long published a mixture of scientific articles from different disciplines, but in the late 1990s there was a move to publish more biology-related articles. Some of this was due to all of the work being published on genetics, but there it was also understood within Science that there was lots of ad money from biotech companies. The ad department made so much money from biotech ads one year that each AAAS staff member got a $1000 holiday bonus.
Everybody was all smiles at the holiday part that year.
Then things went south, but that's another story.
Chuck