We assessed the trends in the proportion of articles on gastric cancer published in major cancer journals, the research fields of interest, and the first author's affiliation. Articles in PubMed, addressing cancer in general and stomach cancer in particular, were quantified. Abstracts of gastric cancer articles were hand-searched. The British Journal of Cancer, Cancer, Cancer Research, the International Journal of Cancer, and the Journal of the National Cancer Institute were included in the journal survey. Stomach cancer was addressed in 2.9% of the articles in 1982-1984 and 3.3% in 2000-2002. The proportion of articles from Asia increased (32.2% vs 50.2%) and that for the United States decreased (34.4% vs 15.1%) in 2000-2002. Articles addressing etiologic genetic factors were more frequent in 2000-2002 (11.5% vs 61.6%). The proportion of stomach cancer articles was largely below the expected share considering the frequency of malignancies, and did not reflect the geography of biomedical publications. A trend was observed favoring the evaluation of genetic factors.