A new database of the references on international clinical practice guidelines: a facility for the evaluation of clinical research

Abstract

Although there are now several bibliographic databases of research publications, such as Google Scholar, Pubmed, Scopus, and the Web of Science (WoS), and some also include counts of citations, there is at present no similarly comprehensive database of the rapidly growing number of clinical practice guidelines (CPGs), with their references, which sometimes number in the hundreds. CPGs have been shown to be useful for the evaluation of clinical (as opposed to basic) biomedical research, which often suffers from relatively low counts of citations in the serial literature. The objectives were to introduce a new citation database, clinical impact ® , and demonstrate how it can be used to evaluate research impact of clinical research publications by exploring the characteristics of CPG citations of two sets of papers, as well as show temporal variation of clinical impact ® and the WoS. The paper includes the methodology used to retain the data and also the rationale adopted to achieve data quality. The analysis showed that although CPGs tend preferentially to cite papers from their own country, this is not always the case. It also showed that cited papers tend to have a more clinical research level than uncited papers. An analysis of diachronous citations in both clinical impact ® and the WoS showed that although the WoS citations showed a decreasing trend after a peak at 2-3 years after publication, this was less clear for CPG citations and a longer timescale would be needed to evaluate their impact on these documents.

Overton -- A bibliometric database of policy document citations

“…Prior work investigating the translation of research through citations in clinical guidelines (Grant, 2000) have utilized specific data sources and other manually curated data sets (Kryl et al, 2012;Newson et al, 2018) to show their value in evaluating research outcomes. Databases of clinical practice guidelines have emerged (Eriksson et al, 2020) to support this specific line of enquiry, and recent work (Guthrie et al, 2019;Pallari et al, 2021; utilizes this information to uncover national trends and highlight relative differences in the evidence base used.…”

Lung cancer research and its citation on clinical practice guidelines

“…One measure of this has recently been developed in the form of the clinical impact® database [18] provided by Minso Solutions AB, which records the details of the references on CPGs. These are developed in many countries, initially in Europe and North America, but now in many other countries such as Australia, Brazil, China, India, Japan, Saudi Arabia and South Africa [19].…”

“…The first set (CPGREF) consisted of references found in the 77 CPGs published between 2003 and 2018, where the references were published between 1955 and 2019. It was created from the lung cancer CPG references from two data sources: the clinical impact® database [18], and from a CPG reference database created at KCL [28]. The second set (WLCP) consisted of the world output of lung cancer research papers retrieved via the WoS, and published between 2004 and 2018.…”

Predicting the clinical citation count of biomedical papers using multilayer perceptron neural network

“…It is increasingly aware that the clinical impact of biomedical papers is of great significance to scientific activities in biomedicine, such as research evaluation, resource allocation, and clinical translation (Eriksson et al, 2020;Kryl et al, 2012;Thelwall & Maflahi, 2016;Zhang et al, 2018). The government, the funders, and the public are usually more concerned with biomedical papers' impact on the health practice than their academic impact (Annapureddy et al, 2020;Hutchins et al, 2019b).…”