title: Letters to the editor 1991. An audit of the MJA's correspondence columns.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  To evaluate correspondence published in The Medical Journal of Australia, with particular emphasis on the level of post-publication peer review which it represented.
  
  
  METHODS
  An audit of all letters submitted to the Journal for publication in 1991.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Six hundred and forty-eight letters were received; 506 (78%) were published and 142 (22%) were not. Three hundred and twenty-nine of the published letters were written in response to material published in the Journal: 96 of these were related to other letters, 71 were replies to other letters by authors, 43 related to original articles, 42 to leading articles and 77 to other articles. Approximately 20% of all original articles published in the Journal attracted correspondence which was published. The commonest reasons for writing were concern about possible flaws in the design of a study, to add information of interest to the subject or to criticise the conclusions reached in the study.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Readers are perhaps not taking full advantage of the opportunity for post-publication peer review provided by correspondence columns in the MJA.
authors.affiliation: Medical Journal of Australia, Kingsgrove, NSW.
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Caswell
mesh_terms: D001315:Australia; D015709:Correspondence as Topic; D010380:Peer Review; D010506:Periodicals as Topic / Q000706:statistics & numerical data