Research productivity of health care policy faculty: a cohort study of Harvard Medical School

Abstract

Abstract In today’s publish or perish environment, the scholarly impact of a research article holds great importance. The present study examined 2343 articles having both altmetric attention scores and citations published by 22 core health care policy faculty members at Harvard Medical School. Web of Science was used to retrieve the citations, whereas Altmetric Explorer was used to determine the altmetric attention score. The evaluation metrics in this study were focused on article-level information to determine each faculty member’s contribution to the health care policy department collected in November 2018. This paper further determined the predictive capability of altmetric attention score for the increase of citations from November 2018 to January 2020. The findings showed J. Michael McWilliams (Professor); Anupam B. Jena (Associate Professor); and Zirui Song (Assistant Professor) were the faculty members with highest altmetric attention score while Ronald C. Kessler (Professor); Nicole Maestas (Associate Professor); and Zirui Song (Assistant Professor) were the faculty members with the highest citation value. The lowest percentage (5.84%) of articles without any citations were published by the professors, whereas the lowest percentage (4.84%) of articles without any social media mention were published by the assistant professors. The health care faculty had the highest percentage of Mendeley readerships followed by tweets, news, and blogs mention in comparison to a meager percentage of policy-related documents mention for their retrieved articles. A significant strong positive correlation ($$r_{\text{R}}$$rR > 0.4) was observed between the aggregated ranked altmetric attention scores and ranked citation/increased citation values for all the faculty members. This study can be extended to determine the research productivity of any department, discipline, or group of faculty members.