Evaluating Research in Cardiovascular Medicine

Can Scientific Quality Be Quantified?

“…In this issue of Circulation, McAlister and colleagues 6 show that bibliometric indices not only undervalue basic and nonrandomized clinical studies (or overvalue large, randomized, clinical trials) but also fail to provide a clear view of the paths to critical cardiovascular discoveries. They also emphasize another important feature of high-quality biomedical research in particular: It should improve health.…”

“…To put these citation frequencies in quantitative perspective, and as emphasized by McAlister and colleagues, it is important to realize that from 1900 to 2005, only 0.5% of the Ϸ38 million published papers were cited more than 200 times, and half were never cited at all. 4,6 It would be interesting to ascertain the distribution of the very highly cited papers among the categories of original research articles, large clinical trials, methods papers, and reviews to gauge the extent to which the conflation of these distinctions confounds the assumption of scientific quality implicit in the citation frequency.…”

Impact factor 2012 for cardiovascular journals: true impact?

“…As a result, every journal editor works hard to improve the journal’s impact factor because it is viewed by publishers as an index of journal quality and success, determining the extent to which the journal is resourced by its sponsoring organisation or publisher [6–8]. However, there are many confounders that may influence the impact factor, at least challenging the scientific significance of an impact factor [9–12]. …”

Irreproducible Experimental Results

“…The reasons for these retractions include plagiarism, data manipulation (especially in figures), and proven data falsification; however, irreproducibility resulting from ‘innocent’ causes may also be included in this pool of retracted publications without being recognized as such. With as many as ~50% of all articles listed in PubMed never cited (14,15) at all, one can conclude either that the work is of minimal significance and not worthy of further pursuit or that it has been pursued and could not be reproduced. The extent to which these two explanations account for this statistic has not been (nor cannot easily be) easily determined.…”