Tracing the indirect societal impacts of biomedical research: development and piloting of a technique based on citations.

ABSTRACT: There is growing interest in assessing the societal impacts of research such as informing health policies and clinical practice, and contributing to improved health. Bibliometric approaches have long been used to assess knowledge outputs, but can they also help evaluate societal impacts? We aimed to see how far the societal impacts could be traced by identifying key research articles in the psychiatry/neuroscience area and exploring their societal impact through analysing several generations of citing papers. Informed by a literature review of citation categorisation, we developed a prototype template to qualitatively assess a reference's importance to the citing paper and tested it on 96 papers. We refined the template for a pilot study to assess the importance of citations, including sel

SUBMITTER: Jones TH 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4869749 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature