In a recent bibliometric analysis of alcohol- and other drugrelatedresearch publications in 11 countries, differenceswere found in research output across countries. In this paperwe use additional secondary data to explore possible sociohistoricalfactors that may contribute to differences in alcohol-related peer-reviewed publications across countries.Aside from general scientific productivity, we propose a possiblelink between the degree to which societies are concernedwith alcohol and alcohol-related research outputs.