When qualifying for higher academic positions junior academics face increasing demands for submitting papers for publication. The criteria for assessing these publications are presently under discussion. Contributions to international English language journals are more highly regarded, and it has become indispensable to have papers published in journals listed in SCI and SSCI. The question remains whether these criteria are valid to judge academic qualifications. Whereas one criterion for validity may be the publication practice of the present academic representatives, it appears that to some extent the chairs themselves would not fulfill the requirements for academic qualification today. Results regarding this are presented and discussed.

It may be possible to identify elements of psychosomatic/psychotherapeutic pri-mary care in the Federal Republic of Germany and the former German Democratic Republic by comparing the current state of basic psychosomatic care (BPSC) in the eastern and western part of Berlin. 278 Berlin patients with psychosocial problems were recruited 1995 for a basic documentation system of the BPSC in connection with a project supported by the Federal Ministry for Health at the Berlin Center. Their data were compared with re-gard to diagnostic and therapeutic measures applied in the eastern and western part of Berlin. Furthermore, 617 questionnaires on basic psychosomatic care were filled out by physicians in private practice in both parts of the city in 1994. Despite the identical or lower assessment of their patients* biopsychosocial stress, East Berlin physicians take considerably more therapeutic measures than their collea-gues in West Berlin. There are only minor differences between physicians from the eastern and western part of the city despite variances in the training and advanced training systems for BPSC. The possible causes are discussed.

The publication practice of the medical-psychological and psychosomatic chairs was the subject of a systematic investigation for the period 1992-1996 in this journal. The background was the discussion about quality and qualification of the academic newcomers. Now, most of the German university medical schools spend the budget--among other criteria--in accordance with the publication practice of the academic representative and their coworkers. The question arises, whether and how the chairs have changed their publication practice in comparison for the period 1998-2002.

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