Librarians' contributions to and impact on pharmacy scholarship: A bibliometric analysis using a systematic approach

Abstract

This bibliometric analysis of librarian and pharmacist co-authored publications was conducted to identify the scholarly contributions made by librarians to pharmacy literature, patterns within co-authorship networks, and the citation impact of librarian co-authors on pharmacy publications.

The authors conducted a comprehensive search of the literature and included 533 relevant citations after screening. These underwent bibliometric analysis and data mining to map the distribution of and trends in the literature over time using document type, citation impact, topic areas, and affiliations.

Librarians from 32 countries and 273 libraries contributed to publications in 180 journals and other sources. Over half were review articles, including systematic reviews, scoping reviews, and meta-analyses, but many original research and non-research papers (e.g., commentaries, protocols, descriptive or experience papers, book chapters, etc.) were also found. Publication topics spanned across many areas of pharmacy practice, research, and education, including clinical studies, pharmacy education, drug design and development, pharmacist roles, health services, and animal-based laboratory studies. When comparing citation counts of these articles to average publications in the same year and field, 69 % of these studies were cited more times. The citation impact of over half of these studies (54 %) is also higher than 50 % of NIH-funded papers, measured by the median of Relative Citation Ratios. The median Citation Benchmarks and Relative Citation Ratios were significantly higher than the expected medians for average publications in the same year and field.

Overall, this analysis demonstrates that librarians are contributing to high-impact research publications around the world and that interprofessional collaboration between authors may be beneficial to scholarship outcomes.