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Is medical research informing professional practice more highly cited? Evidence from AHFS DI Essentials in drugs.com

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Listed:
  • Mike Thelwall

    (University of Wolverhampton)

  • Kayvan Kousha

    (University of Wolverhampton)

  • Mahshid Abdoli

    (University of Wolverhampton)

Abstract

Citation-based indicators are often used to help evaluate the impact of published medical studies, even though the research has the ultimate goal of improving human wellbeing. One direct way of influencing health outcomes is by guiding physicians and other medical professionals about which drugs to prescribe. A high profile source of this guidance is the AHFS DI Essentials product of the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists, which gives systematic information for drug prescribers. AHFS DI Essentials documents, which are also indexed by Drugs.com, include references to academic studies and the referenced work is therefore helping patients by guiding drug prescribing. This article extracts AHFS DI Essentials documents from Drugs.com and assesses whether articles referenced in these information sheets have their value recognised by higher Scopus citation counts. A comparison of mean log-transformed citation counts between articles that are and are not referenced in AHFS DI Essentials shows that AHFS DI Essentials references are more highly cited than average for the publishing journal. This suggests that medical research influencing drug prescribing is more cited than average.

Suggested Citation

  • Mike Thelwall & Kayvan Kousha & Mahshid Abdoli, 2017. "Is medical research informing professional practice more highly cited? Evidence from AHFS DI Essentials in drugs.com," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 112(1), pages 509-527, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:scient:v:112:y:2017:i:1:d:10.1007_s11192-017-2292-3
    DOI: 10.1007/s11192-017-2292-3
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Mike Thelwall & Kayvan Kousha, 2016. "Are citations from clinical trials evidence of higher impact research? An analysis of ClinicalTrials.gov," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 109(2), pages 1341-1351, November.
    2. Mike Thelwall & Nabeil Maflahi, 2016. "Guideline references and academic citations as evidence of the clinical value of health research," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 67(4), pages 960-966, April.
    3. Mike Thelwall & David Stuart, 2006. "Web crawling ethics revisited: Cost, privacy, and denial of service," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 57(13), pages 1771-1779, November.
    4. Éric Archambault & David Campbell & Yves Gingras & Vincent Larivière, 2009. "Comparing bibliometric statistics obtained from the Web of Science and Scopus," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 60(7), pages 1320-1326, July.
    5. Derek De Solla Price, 1976. "A general theory of bibliometric and other cumulative advantage processes," Journal of the American Society for Information Science, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 27(5), pages 292-306, September.
    6. Thelwall, Mike, 2016. "Citation count distributions for large monodisciplinary journals," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 10(3), pages 863-874.
    7. Thelwall, Mike, 2017. "Three practical field normalised alternative indicator formulae for research evaluation," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 11(1), pages 128-151.
    8. Thelwall, Mike, 2016. "Are there too many uncited articles? Zero inflated variants of the discretised lognormal and hooked power law distributions," Journal of Informetrics, Elsevier, vol. 10(2), pages 622-633.
    9. Francis Narin & Gabriel Pinski & Helen Hofer Gee, 1976. "Structure of the Biomedical Literature," Journal of the American Society for Information Science, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 27(1), pages 25-45, January.
    10. B Ian Hutchins & Xin Yuan & James M Anderson & George M Santangelo, 2016. "Relative Citation Ratio (RCR): A New Metric That Uses Citation Rates to Measure Influence at the Article Level," PLOS Biology, Public Library of Science, vol. 14(9), pages 1-25, September.
    11. Jonathan Grant, 1999. "Evaluating the outcomes of biomedical research on healthcare," Research Evaluation, Oxford University Press, vol. 8(1), pages 33-38, April.
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    Cited by:

    1. Diana Hicks & Julia Melkers & Kimberley R. Isett, 2019. "A characterization of professional media and its links to research," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 119(2), pages 827-843, May.
    2. Mike Thelwall, 2021. "Measuring Societal Impacts Of Research With Altmetrics? Common Problems And Mistakes," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 35(5), pages 1302-1314, December.

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