FW: Biomedcentral paper on citation of reviews that may interest you.

[Garfield, Eugene]

This article is available free of charge at BiomedCentral.
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/1/2/



Research article
Systematic reviews: a cross-sectional study of location and citation counts
Victor M Montori, Nancy L Wilczynski, Douglas Morgan, R Brian Haynes, the
Hedges Team
BMC Medicine 2003, 1:2 (24 November 2003)
[Abstract] [Full text]   http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/1/2/

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Abstract

Background
Systematic reviews summarize all pertinent evidence on a defined health
question. They help clinical scientists to direct their research and
clinicians to keep updated. Our objective was to determine the extent to
which systematic reviews are clustered in a large collection of clinical
journals and whether review type (narrative or systematic) affects citation
counts.
Methods
We used hand searches of 170 clinical journals in the fields of general
internal medicine, primary medical care, nursing, and mental health to
identify review articles (year 2000). We defined 'review' as any full text
article that was bannered as a review, overview, or meta-analysis in the
title or in a section heading, or that indicated in the text that the
intention of the authors was to review or summarize the literature on a
particular topic. We obtained citation counts for review articles in the
five journals that published the most systematic reviews.
Results
11% of the journals concentrated 80% of all systematic reviews. Impact
factors were weakly correlated with the publication of systematic reviews
(R2 = 0.075, P = 0.0035). There were more citations for systematic reviews
(median 26.5, IQR 12 – 56.5) than for narrative reviews (8, 20, P <.0001 for
the difference). Systematic reviews had twice as many citations as narrative
reviews published in the same journal (95% confidence interval 1.5 – 2.7).
Conclusions
A few clinical journals published most systematic reviews. Authors cited
systematic reviews more often than narrative reviews, an indirect
endorsement of the 'hierarchy of evidence'.

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