Abstract
Federal grant funding to support infrastructure development of translational biomedical research centers is a form of public health intervention. Establishing rigorous methods for measuring center success and outcomes is essential to justify continued funding. Bibliometric data compiled from a 5-year funding cycle of neurodegeneration and translational neuroscience research center were analyzed using the package bibliometrix for open-source software R and the NIH-developed research tool iCite. The research team and their collaborators (n = 485) produced 157 grant-citing publications from 2015-2020. The science was produced by small research teams clustered around three main communities of topics: Alzheimer's Disease, brain imaging, and neuropsychological testing in the elderly. Using the relative citation ratio, the publications produced by the research team were found to be influential when compared to other R01-funded publications. Recent developments in bibliometric analysis expand beyond traditional measurement capabilities to better understand the characteristics, outcomes, and influences of research teams. These findings can be used to inform researchers and institutions about research team composition, productivity, and success. Measures of research influence may be used to justify return on investment to funders.
Highlights
Federal grant funding to support infrastructure development of translational biomedical research centers is a form of public health intervention
Taking a science of team science (SciTS) perspective, we identify methods to evaluate research center success and provide practical application of their use with data from an NIHfunded translational research team, the Center for Neurodegeneration and Translational Neuroscience (CNTN)
In this study, we used two bibliometric analysis tools to explore how network approaches can be used within a SciTS evaluation framework to describe trends and characteristics of research collaboration and scientific knowledge production for an National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded, multi-site translational research team
Summary
The investment of federal extramural grant funds to create infrastructure for translational, collaborative, and interdisciplinary biomedical research is a form of public health intervention. We describe more sophisticated measures for evaluating collaborative scientific productivity and influence of publications stemming from grant-funded biomedical research institutes and centers over short-term and long-term horizons. We used a multi-phase approach to compile a comprehensive list of all scholarly products (journal articles, book chapters, conference papers, etc.) which cited the grant as a funding source between the years 2015-2020. A second bibliometric analysis was selected to measure article influence through the use of iCite, the publicly available research tool developed by the NIH. As a measure of influence, the most influential article produced by the team received an RCR of 41.22 (max 41.22) with mean 4.71 (SEM 0.70) This means that the average product produced by this research team had performed, at the time of inquiry, nearly five times better than its field-normalized and time-normalized peer publications. A visualization of the RCR distribution displayed in Figure 3 shows a clustering of products in the RCR range of 0.5-4 with a scattering of a dozen articles covering the RCR range of approximately 8-42
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