Publication Impact of NIH-funded Research – A First Look

In a recent PNAS commentary, Daniel Shapiro and Kent Vrana of Pennsylvania State University, argue that “Celebrating R and D expenditures badly misses the point.” Instead of focusing on how much money is spent, the research enterprise should instead focus on its outcomes – its discoveries that advance knowledge and lead to improvements in health. Of course, as we’ve noted before, measuring research impact is hard, and there is no gold standard. But for now, let’s take a look at one measure of productivity, namely the publication of highly-cited papers. Some in the research community suggest that a research paper citation is a nod to the impact and significance of the findings reported in that paper – in other words, more highly-cited papers are indicative of highly regarded and impactful research. If considering highly-cited papers as a proxy for productivity, it’s not enough that we simply count citations, because publication and citation behaviors differ greatly among fields – some fields generate many more citations per paper. Furthermore, citation counts vary over time: it would not be fair to compare a paper published in 2013 with one published in 2008, as the latter paper has had 5 more years to generate citations. One approach, to go beyond raw citation counts and control for factors such as citation behaviors and time, is to empirically bin papers according to topic, year of publication, and article type (e.g. research article, review article). Within ...
Source: NIH Extramural Nexus - Category: Research Authors: Tags: blog Open Mike bibliometrics citations Funding data impact publications Source Type: funding