Into the gray: a modified approach to citation analysis to better understand research impact.

Abstract

Academic authors and funders often want to know the “impact” of their publications, and this impact is generally judged by how and where the paper is cited in other academic works. This limited appraisal has been expanded in recent years as many are beginning to argue that nonacademic publishing venues should be included in assessing the impact of academic publications. This is an issue of particular concern with the growing emphasis on “knowledge translation” from the scientific literature to policy and practice applications 1–3 and to sources other than the traditional peer-reviewed and indexed venues, in other words, translation into the “gray literature” 4. In this comment and opinion piece, the authors describe the process of developing and applying a “modified citation analysis” that builds on existing methods of examining a research paper's impact in two key ways: (1) by deliberately including gray literature in the citation analysis search process, and (2) by including quantitative and qualitative methods of analysis to gain a better understanding of how a research paper was used. By broadening the search and deepening the level of analysis, we suggest this new approach can better assess the impact of a given research paper—both within and outside of traditional peer-reviewed venues. We begin with a review of gray literature and then describe current methods for analyzing the impact of a research paper. Finally, we use a specific example to describe our new approach, highlight its potential for evolving the field of citation and impact analysis, and discuss future refinements and evaluation.