Reality check: An experimental manipulation of inferential confusion in eating disorders

Ouellet‐Courtois, Catherine; Aardema, Frederick; O’Connor, Kieron

doi:10.1016/j.jbtep.2020.101614

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 40 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Moreover, an article might use a questionnaire but not mention it directly, instead focusing on the results or implying a survey with related terminology like ‘respondents’ or phrases like ‘were asked’. For example, the use of a questionnaire might be inferred from the phrase ‘Participants completed measures of IC [Inferential confusion], negative affect and compulsive behaviours after watching the videos’ in one behavioural therapy article abstract, and this would be confirmed in the methods section of the main body (Ouellet‐Courtois et al, 2020). Some of the missed results could have been recovered by exploiting the automatically indexed keywords in Scopus (e.g., EMTREE, MeSH) but these were not uniformly applied over 1996–2019, so might give misleading trend information.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Questionnaires mentioned in academic research 1996–2019: Rapid increase but declining citation impact

Fairclough

Thelwall

2021

Learned Publishing

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Questionnaires are a device to elicit human perspectives, self-reports or knowledge. This article investigates which broad academic fields use questionnaires, whether this use is increasing, and whether it generates average citation impact. This is investigated through a nonprobability sample: articles mentioning questionnaires in their titles, abstracts, or keywords. This procedure captures a minority of research using questionnaires, with substantial biases against fields using alternative terminology, such as 'instrument' or 'survey', or that rarely explicitly mention questionnaires in titles, abstract or keywords because they play a minor role. The results suggest that the proportion of journal articles using questionnaires tripled between 1996 and 2019, and this proportion increased in all 27 broad Scopus fields. Over the same period, the citation impact of the identified research declined from above average to below average. Thus, whilst academic research seems to be increasingly using questionnaires, the quality or scholarly value of research using questionnaires may be declining.These are tentative conclusions because of the unknown sampling bias for the set of questionnaire-based articles analysed.

show abstract

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%