United States Family Medicine research collaborations associated with higher citation and funding rates

Abstract

INTRODUCTION Among academic medical disciplines, Family Medicine (FM) research is notable for its breadth of health-care content areas, making it particularly susceptible to interdisciplinary collaboration. AIM This study characterises the degree and typology of such collaborations, and determines whether collaboration patterns are associated with citation frequency and funding. METHODS This cross-sectional study describes collaboration patterns for publications from 2015 indexed in Web of Science and authored by faculty from United States (US) departments of family medicine (DFMs). We determined mean number of total and FM authors per publication, and percentage of publications with FM first or last authors. Publications were categorised by inclusion of non-FM faculty author(s) and number of DFMs represented. RESULTS Overall, 919 FM faculty from 109 DFMs authored a total of 1872 unique publications in 2015. There was an average of 6.8 authors per publication with 1.4 authors being FM faculty. FM faculty were first author on 26.2% and last author on 29.2% of publications. Of all publications, 0.9% were single FM Author; 1.0% were same DFM; 0.3% were multiple DFMs; 72.4% were single FM Author+non-FM; 19.3% were same DFM+non-FM; 6.0% were multiple DFMs+non-FM. FM publications with non-FM faculty authors showed higher citation rates, higher rates of funding, and lower rates of having no funding source. DISCUSSION Most FM publications involved non-FM faculty authors. Collaborations involving non-FM authors were correlated with higher impact publications and projects that were more likely to have been funded.