The impact of cancer research: how publications influence UK cancer clinical guidelines

Abstract

There has been a substantially increased interest in biomedical research impact assessment over the past 5 years. This can be studied by a number of methods, but its influence on clinical guidelines must rank as one of the most important. In cancer, there are 43 UK guidelines (and associated Health Technology Assessments) published (up to October 2006) across three series, each of which has an evidence base in the form of references, many of which are papers in peer-reviewed journals. These have all been identified and analysed to determine their geographical provenance and type of research, in comparison with overall oncology research published in the peak years of guideline references (1999 -2001). The UK papers were cited nearly three times as frequently as would have been expected from their presence in world oncology research (6.5%). Within the United Kingdom, Edinburgh and Glasgow stood out for their unexpectedly high contributions to the guidelines' scientific base. The cited papers from the United Kingdom acknowledged much more explicit funding from all sectors than did the UK cancer research papers at the same research level.

Tracking the impact of research on policy and practice: investigating the feasibility of using citations in clinical guidelines for research evaluation

“…These results corroborate earlier research 13. Other bibliometric studies on UK clinical guidelines also found that a significant share of publications cited are published within the 10 years prior to the release of these guidelines 19 25…”

“…For a funder, if research it has supported is referenced as part of the evidence supporting a national and/or international clinical guideline, then it is an indication that this research is likely to be influencing policy and practice. Hence, clinical guidelines are potentially an attractive resource to support impact tracking and assessment 13 14…”

Validity of altmetrics data for measuring societal impact: A study using data from Altmetric and F1000Prime

“…Grant (1999) and Lewison and Sullivan (2008) pursued a similar objective to Narin, et al (1997) with their evaluation of clinical guidelines: how does knowledge flow from clinical research to clinical practice? The pilot study by Grant (1999) examined three guidelines and was able to ascertain that they contained citations of a total of 284 publications (which can be categorised by author, research institution, country, etc.).…”

Measuring impact in research evaluations: a thorough discussion of methods for, effects of and problems with impact measurements

“…To measure societal impact, therefore, a decision needs to be made in each instance about what that impact actually is (Morgan, 2014). In the past, two methods of measuring societal impact based on a citation-equivalent have emerged as particularly useful: evaluating citations in patents (technological impact) (Austrian Science Fund, 2007;Kousha & Thelwall, in press) and in clinical guidelines (medical impact) (Lewison & Sullivan, 2008;Thelwall & Maflahi, 2015).…”