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. 2020 Apr 2;4(4):336-344.
doi: 10.1017/cts.2020.29.

Bibliometrics approach to evaluating the research impact of CTSAs: A pilot study

Fei Yu  1 , Allison Alicia Van  2 , Tanha Patel  2   3 , Nandita Mani  1 , Andrea Carnegie  2   3 , Giselle M Corbie-Smith  2   3 , Timothy Carey  2   3 , John Buse  2   3 , Gaurav Dave  2   3
Affiliations

Bibliometrics approach to evaluating the research impact of CTSAs: A pilot study

Fei Yu et al. J Clin Transl Sci. .

Abstract

Introduction: To enhance the performance evaluation of Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) hubs, we examined the utility of advanced bibliometric measures that go beyond simple publication counts to demonstrate the impact of translational research output.

Methods: The sampled data included North Carolina Translational and Clinical Science Institute (NC TraCS)-supported publications produced between September 2008 and March 2017. We adopted advanced bibliometric measures and a state-of-the-art bibliometric network analysis tool to assess research productivity, citation impact, the scope of research collaboration, and the clusters of research topics.

Results: Totally, 754 NC TraCS-supported publications generated over 24,000 citation counts by April 2017 with an average of 33 cites per article. NC TraCS-supported research papers received more than twice as many cites per year as the average National Institute of Health-funded research publications from the same field and time. We identified the top productive researchers and their networks within the CTSA hub. Findings demonstrated the impact of NC TraCS in facilitating interdisciplinary collaborations within the CTSA hub and across the CTSA consortium and connecting researchers with right peers and organizations.

Conclusion: Both improved bibliometrics measures and bibliometric network analysis can bring new perspectives to CTSA evaluation via citation influence and the scope of research collaborations.

Keywords: CTSA evaluation; bibliometrics; network analysis; research impact measurement; translational research.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.

Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
Scholarly output by year and total citation counts of NC TraCS-supported publications (2008–2016) (N = 736).
Fig. 2.
Fig. 2.
Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) and Relative Citation Ratio (RCR) distribution of NC TraCS-supported publications.
Fig. 3.
Fig. 3.
Citation benchmarking of NC TraCS-supported publications (2008–2017).
Fig. 4.
Fig. 4.
Top productive (most published) researchers’ co-authorship network.
Fig. 5.
Fig. 5.
Co-authorship of most published researchers in each 30-month period.
Fig. 6.
Fig. 6.
(a) Top external collaborated institutions of NC TraCS-supported research; (b) collaboration network of NC TraCS-supported research with other CTSA institutes (n = 65).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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