The impacts of diabetes research from 31 European Countries in 2002 to 2013

The evaluation of a country’s medical research outputs should include measures of their impact on medical practice, on health policy, and decision-making, as well as conventional citations in the serial literature. This study examined three measures of impact: geometric mean, arithmetic mean, and world scale mean, applied to one disease area, namely, diabetes, to investigate the amount of agreement between them in terms of the impacts of the research of different European countries. First, citations to diabetes research papers in the Web of Science from 31 European countries from 2002 to 2013 were analysed. Papers from Finland, Switzerland, Denmark, and the UK were the most cited by other papers on both geometric and arithmetic means, and in terms of their presence in the top 5% of papers with the most citations. Secondly, the references on 103 European diabetes clinical practice guidelines from 21 countries were analysed. Papers from The Netherlands, Finland, the UK, and Austria were the most cited in the clinical guidelines relative to the countries’ presence amongst diabetes research. Finally, an analysis of newspaper stories about non-communicable disease research from 22 European countries included 822 on diabetes research (9.6% of the total) and showed that the subject was of substantial interest. The countries whose papers were the most cited relative to their presence in the subject area were Finland, Norway, the UK, and Belgium, but those from Japan, China, and South Korea were not well cited. Different European countries scored highly on these three measures. Scandinavian countries and the UK appeared to perform strongly on all three, but Switzerland only on conventional citation counts. The increased emphasis placed on demonstration of the social and economic impacts stemming from research makes the methodologies described herein of particular value to future evaluations of medical research.