Reviewed by Megan Craig, M.Sc.Aug 15 2023 Scientific journals and research papers are evaluated by a metric known as their "impact factor," which is based on how many times a given paper is cited by other papers. However, a new study from MIT and other institutions suggests that this measure does not accurately capture the impact of medical papers on health outcomes for all patients, particularly those in low- or middle-income countries.
Leo Anthony Celi, senior research scientist at MIT's Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, associate professor at Harvard Medical School, and one of the authors of the paper "How the medical knowledge system is designed has led to the fact that 80 percent of publications come from 20 percent of countries, and then the guidelines that are disseminated to treat diabetes, to treat hypertension, to treat cancer, are informed by trials and observational studies in those 20 percent of countries," he says.
The final metric that the researchers proposed is based on the diversity of traits of patients included in a given study, including sex, race-ethnicity, language, age, and geography. However, because many of the papers analyzed in this study were not open-access, the researchers could not get this information for many of the papers and so did not include it in their final analysis.