Article type
Year
Abstract
Background: It is of interest to the Airways Group to know how often Airways reviews are cited in other research papers. We also wanted to investigate possible reasons for some reviews being more frequently cited than others.
Objectives:
To establish how often a sample of Airways reviews are cited in other papers
To establish if there is any relationship between the number of times cited (NTC) and the characteristics of the review:
Is there a correlation between the number of included studies in a review, and the NTC?
Is there a difference between the NTC when it shows significant or non-significant effects in the primary outcome?
Is there a difference between the NTC if it deals with a pharmacological or non-pharmacological intervention?
Methods: A group of 19 reviews on interventions in stable COPD were identified. The ISI Web of Science cited reference search was used to establish the NTC of each review. Where the first author had more than one Cochrane review, individual citations were read and where necessary, the full paper and reference list were checked to ascertain which review was being cited. We erred on the side of caution and if the full paper was not available, the citation was not counted.
Results: The 19 stable COPD reviews have been cited a total of 187 times, with an average of 9.8 citations per review. The lowest citation rate was 1 citation (1 review) and the highest was 30 (2 reviews). There appears to be a moderate positive correlation between the NTC and the number of studies included in the review. The difference in NTC between reviews with significant/non-significant effects in the primary outcome and between reviews with pharmacological/non-pharmacological interventions was in both cases non-significant for this small sample.
Conclusions: It is not possible to draw any definite conclusions as the sample we looked at was small, but it has been encouraging to find out that Airways reviews are being referenced, and many more questions have been raised that could be investigated in a larger sample of reviews.
Objectives:
To establish how often a sample of Airways reviews are cited in other papers
To establish if there is any relationship between the number of times cited (NTC) and the characteristics of the review:
Is there a correlation between the number of included studies in a review, and the NTC?
Is there a difference between the NTC when it shows significant or non-significant effects in the primary outcome?
Is there a difference between the NTC if it deals with a pharmacological or non-pharmacological intervention?
Methods: A group of 19 reviews on interventions in stable COPD were identified. The ISI Web of Science cited reference search was used to establish the NTC of each review. Where the first author had more than one Cochrane review, individual citations were read and where necessary, the full paper and reference list were checked to ascertain which review was being cited. We erred on the side of caution and if the full paper was not available, the citation was not counted.
Results: The 19 stable COPD reviews have been cited a total of 187 times, with an average of 9.8 citations per review. The lowest citation rate was 1 citation (1 review) and the highest was 30 (2 reviews). There appears to be a moderate positive correlation between the NTC and the number of studies included in the review. The difference in NTC between reviews with significant/non-significant effects in the primary outcome and between reviews with pharmacological/non-pharmacological interventions was in both cases non-significant for this small sample.
Conclusions: It is not possible to draw any definite conclusions as the sample we looked at was small, but it has been encouraging to find out that Airways reviews are being referenced, and many more questions have been raised that could be investigated in a larger sample of reviews.