Measuring the contribution of clinical trials to Bibliometric indicators:: Citations and Journal Impact Factor®

Clinical trials play a relevant role in the development of new drugs. After a clinical trial has been carried out, its results are usually published in scientific journals. These papers receive a significant number of citations that can affect the scores for indicators such as the Journal Impact Factor (R) or the h-index. However, there is a criticism with this practice especially because around 3/4 of the clinical trials are funded by industry that can use this channel to promote their products. In addition, the Frascati Manual (OECD) establishes that clinical trials must be considered as part of product development and not research activities. We have established two main research questions: (i) Are clinical trials cited significantly more than other papers? (ii) To what extent are Journal Impact Factors modified by citations to clinical trials? We use the database from Thomson-ISI Web of Science (R) jointly with Medline to answer these questions. Our preliminary results suggest the following remarks. Firstly, the clinical trials are significantly more cited than other papers. Secondly, the Impact Factors are significantly reduced if we do not take into account the clinical trials. We believe that this information could be useful for the Research Policy decision makers.