Policy impact of COVID-19 research published by the IU School of Medicine: An exploratory bibliometric analysis, 2020-2021

Abstract

Introduction/Background: Policy documents serve as an essential reference point in the process of developing and implementing policies that have an impact on various aspects of society, including healthcare. This is especially evident in the way that governments around the world have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by implementing measures to control the spread of the virus and to protect public health. Policies outline actions and provide guidance for policy implementation to inform decision-making at all levels of government and society. Regulations, guidelines, white papers, and reports are just a few examples of the different types of policy documents that can be issued by governmental agencies and institutions, intergovermental organizations, research institutes, think tanks, and other groups. These written statements are the outcome of the research and evidence analysis that has been conducted. Regarding research impact, the citations of publications used in policy documents provide evidence that the policies are based on reliable and authoritative sources of information. They also reflect the utility and quality of research output. In this exploratory bibliometric analysis, we present an overview of altmetrics (or alternative metrics) data, specifically for citations in policy documents, for IU School of Medicine (IUSM) publications. Study objective: This study aims to identify and analyze the policy documents that mention research published by the IU School of Medicine from 2020-2021. We analyzed the overall characteristics of policy documents, including type, geography, institution of origin, language, year of publication, and time-lag. We also analyzed the overall publication patterns of the articles cited in policy documents, including the availability of preprint versions of the publications cited in policy documents and funding support information. This approach aims to contribute to a better understanding of the characteristics of policy document sources that disseminate COVID-19 publications generated by the IUSM, and the types of research mentioned most often in the policy documents. Methods We used the PubMed database to search and find accurate citations of research articles published by IUSM authors during 2020-2021 related to COVID-19. Articles were searched using a combination of keywords and MeSH Terms related to “COVID-19” OR “Sars-Cov-2 ”, combined with our in-house developed affiliation name search. To identify mentions in policy documents the Overton.io platform, bibliometric database of policy documents citations, was used. Excel was used to aggregate, clean up and analyze the data and to generate the analysis and network visualizations. Results and Conclusions Overall, 71 (14.5%) of the 564 publications have been cited 192 times in 161 policy sources (1.2 average citations per document) by time of data collection (January 10, 2023). The cited articles identified were published in 57 journals; the journal with the most cited articles (2 articles, ≥ 31 citations) was JAMA. Most of the citations associated with these articles come from sources generated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (33 citations). The findings provide relevant insight to the IUSM research community concerning policy documents mentioned and may support researchers when making decisions for developing a publication and research strategy.