Bibliometrics approach to evaluating the research impact of CTSAs: A pilot study

INTRODUCTION: To enhance the performance evaluation of Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) hubs, we examined the utility of advanced bibliometric measures that go beyond simple publication counts to demonstrate the impact of translational research output. METHODS: The sampled data included North Carolina Translational and Clinical Science Institute (NC TraCS)-supported publications produced between September 2008 and March 2017. We adopted advanced bibliometric measures and a state-of-the-art bibliometric network analysis tool to assess research productivity, citation impact, the scope of research collaboration, and the clusters of research topics. RESULTS: Totally, 754 NC TraCS-supported publications generated over 24,000 citation counts by April 2017 with an average of 33 cites per article. NC TraCS-supported research papers received more than twice as many cites per year as the average National Institute of Health-funded research publications from the same field and time. We identified the top productive researchers and their networks within the CTSA hub. Findings demonstrated the impact of NC TraCS in facilitating interdisciplinary collaborations within the CTSA hub and across the CTSA consortium and connecting researchers with right peers and organizations. CONCLUSION: Both improved bibliometrics measures and bibliometric network analysis can bring new perspectives to CTSA evaluation via citation influence and the scope of research collaborations.