Abstract
BackgroundThe evaluation of translational health research is important for various reasons such as the research impact assessment, research funding allocation, accountability, and strategic research policy formulation. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the research productivity, strength and diversity of research collaboration networks and impact of research supported by a large biomedical research centre in the United Kingdom (UK).MethodsBibliometric analysis of research publications by translational researchers affiliated with the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Oxford Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) from April 2012 to March 2017.ResultsAnalysis included 2377 translational research publications that were published during the second 5-year funding period of the NIHR Oxford BRC. Author details were available for 99.75% of the publications with DOIs (2359 of 2365 with DOIs), and the number of authors per publication was median 9 (mean = 18.03, SD = 3.63, maximum = 2467 authors). Author lists also contained many consortia, groups, committees, and teams (n = 165 in total), with 1238 additional contributors, where membership was reported. The BRC co-authorship i.e., research collaboration network for these publications involved 20,229 nodes (authors, of which 1606 nodes had Oxford affiliations), and approximately 4.3 million edges (authorship linkages). Articles with a valid DOIs (2365 of 2377, 99.5%) were collectively cited more than 155,000 times and the average Field Citation Ratio was median 6.75 (geometric mean = 7.12) while the average Relative Citation Ratio was median 1.50 (geometric mean = 1.83) for the analysed publications.ConclusionsThe NIHR Oxford BRC generated substantial translational research publications and facilitated a huge collaborative network of translational researchers working in complex structures and consortia, which shows success across the whole of this BRC funding period. Further research involving continued uptake of unique persistent identifiers and the tracking of other research outputs such as clinical innovations and patents would allow a more detailed understanding of large research enterprises such as NIHR BRCs in the UK.
Highlights
Introduction of the study settingThe role of the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) is to improve the health and welfare of the nation through research [25]
The research themes were bigger research groups that were established for the first 5-year funding period of the Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) while the working groups were established as newer research ‘start ups’ for the second 5-year funding period and in some cases expected to be upgraded as research themes in the BRCs, as part of the BRC’s future strategy
Study objective The objective of this study was to evaluate translational research productivity, strength and diversity of research collaboration networks and impact of research supported by the NIHR Oxford BRC during its second 5-year period from April 2012 to March 2017
Summary
The role of the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) is to improve the health and welfare of the nation through research [25] To this end, in 2007, the NIHR established five Biomedical Research Centres (BRCs), where NHS Foundation Trusts work in partnership with the Universities [26]. A conventional method of evaluating translational research involves assessment of academic outputs including research publications and citations, which could be better evaluated by bibliometric methods and indicators [29], research network analysis and visualization technologies [30] With this in mind, we set about gathering the academic research outputs of our second BRC funding cycle covering the period 2012–2017 during which the BRC comprised 14 research themes and six working groups (Additional file 1: Box S1). In the United Kingdom (UK), translational biomedical research involves research collaboration between universities and hospitals and these collaborations become complex because of the research collaborators’ diverse structures, procedures and work settings and more importantly due to the complex nature of patients, clinical practice and healthcare delivery [8, 9]
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