Objective: The premise of our study was to investigate the characteristics of family medicine (FM) manuscripts that predicted to affect its citation rate.
Design: We conducted a cross-sectional study of published articles (n = 191), from January to June 2008, from 6 major FM journals with the highest impact factor. Annals of Family Medicine (IF = 1.864), British Journal of General Medicine (1.104), Journal of American Board of Family Medicine (1.015), Family Practice (0.976), BMC Family Practice (0.815) and Canadian Family Physicians (0.283). Citation counts for these articles were retrieved using Web of Science filter on SCImago and 26 article characteristics were tabulated manually. We then predicted the citation rate by performing univariate analysis, spearman rank-order correlation, and multiple regression model on the collected variables.
Results: Using spearman rank-order correlation, we found the following variables to have significant positive correlation with citations: number of references (rs and p-value, 0.21529 and 0.0028 respectively), total words (0.22979, 0.0014), number of pages (0.22124, 0.0021), study design in title (0.03, 0.0001), structured abstract (0.06, 0.005), and open access (0.03, 0.003). In a multivariate linear regression model, the following variables predicted increased citation rates (p < 0.001, R2 = 0.38): reporting of study design in the title, structured abstract and open access.
Conclusion: Editors and authors of FM can enhance the impact of their journals and articles by utilizing this bibliometric study when assembling their manuscript.
Key Words: Bibliometrics; citation rate; citation; manuscript; Family Medicine
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