Uncitedness in the Top General Medical Journals
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Poostchi Ophthalmology Research Center, Shiraz University of Medical Sciences, Shiraz, Iran; 2Department of Biostatistics, Shiraz University of Medical Sciences, Shiraz, Iran.
J Gen Intern Med DOI: 10.1007/s11606-019-05290-2 © Society of General Internal Medicine 2019
research has received much attention due to its U ncited extent and impact on scholarship. It has been claimed
dropped sharply in the IF range of 0 to 1, then decreased with less slope for the IF range of 1 to 10, and almost reached a near-zero plateau for the journals with IF > 10. Figure 2 b and c show the longitudinal uncitedness profile for the 2000 and 2010 cohorts, respectively. Top medical journals showed a great leap toward less uncitedness in 2010 cohort compared with 2000, while other journals did not significantly improve
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that articles without a single citation do not have any constructive effect on future research and might be a waste of resources.1 Thus, the percent of uncited articles in any given journal could be considered as a measure of abundance of lowimpact articles within that journal, very much like the impact factor (IF) that serves as an index of average impact of all published papers in a given journal.
METHODS
We investigated rate of uncitedness in five high-impact journals: the Annals of Internal Medicine (AIM), the British Medical Journal (BMJ), the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), the Lancet, and the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). Using Web of Science (WOS),2 we calculated the rate of uncitedness in the aforementioned journals in 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2015. To compare, we also assessed the uncitedness for all general medical journals.
RESULTS
The mean rate of uncitedness at five years after publication progressively improved from 8.3 for the 1990 cohort to 7.1 and 0.7 for the 2000 and 2010 cohorts, respectively (Fig. 1). The same pattern was observed for the mean rate of uncited researches in the first year of publication (46.0, 38.0, 18.9, and 15.5 for 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2015 cohorts, respectively) and in the second year (16.1, 13.4, 2.7, and 1.7, respectively). There were no associations between the journals’ IF or the number of published articles, and the rate of uncited research (Spearman’s rho IF vs. uncitedness − 0.46, P = 0.18; Spearman’s rho articles vs. uncitedness 0.43, P = 0.21). Figure 2 a shows the association between the IF and uncitedness. Overall, there was a negative correlation, in which journals with greater IF had less uncitedness profile. However, this association was nonlinear: the uncitedness
DISCUSSION
The overall rate of uncited research was low for all top general medical journals during the above mentioned years, except for one journal in 1990. This could be attributed to the individual policy of the journal or less likely misclassification of uncitable papers into citable articles via the WOS system. Providing unintentional self-citation for original articles by encouraging editorial or correspondence pieces for almost all articles might contribute to
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