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Guideline references and academic citations as evidence of the clinical value of health research
Author(s) -
Thelwall Mike,
Maflahi Nabeil
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
journal of the association for information science and technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.903
H-Index - 145
eISSN - 2330-1643
pISSN - 2330-1635
DOI - 10.1002/asi.23432
Subject(s) - citation , altmetrics , audience measurement , guideline , evidence based medicine , value (mathematics) , medline , medicine , psychology , medical education , alternative medicine , library science , computer science , political science , pathology , machine learning , law
This article introduces a new source of evidence of the value of medical‐related research: citations from clinical guidelines. These give evidence that research findings have been used to inform the day‐to‐day practice of medical staff. To identify whether citations from guidelines can give different information from that of traditional citation counts, this article assesses the extent to which references in clinical guidelines tend to be highly cited in the academic literature and highly read in Mendeley. Using evidence from the U nited K ingdom, references associated with the UK 's N ational I nstitute of H ealth and C linical E xcellence ( NICE ) guidelines tended to be substantially more cited than comparable articles, unless they had been published in the most recent 3 years. Citation counts also seemed to be stronger indicators than M endeley readership altmetrics. Hence, although presence in guidelines may be particularly useful to highlight the contributions of recently published articles, for older articles citation counts may already be sufficient to recognize their contributions to health in society.