Advocacy and public policy were determined to be one of the six key focal points for the profession at the Health Education in the 21st Century meeting held in 1995. A content analysis of journals of the member organizations of the Coalition of National Health Education Organizations was conducted to discover whether there was a difference in the number of advocacy and policy initiative-related articles published between the 5-year periods immediately preceding and following this meeting. The titles and abstracts for all research articles and commentaries appearing in the "American Journal of Health Education," the "American Journal of Public Health," "Journal of School Health," "Health Educator," "Health Education & Behavior," "Health Promotion Practice," and the "Journal of American College Health" were examined using a 10-item descriptor code designed to measure advocacy and policy terminology. Intercoder reliability was 94%. Inference proportions analysis revealed statistically significant differences in the number of articles containing advocacy and policy related keywords (p less than 0.05) between the two time periods for only the "American Journal of Health Education" and the "Journal of School Health." A variety of suggestions for increasing the number of advocacy and policy publications is recommended. (Contains 2 tables.)