Development and characterization of a theory- and data-driven core journals list in pharmacy practice.

Objective: To develop a core journals list based on United States pharmacy practice faculty publication records and Bradford's Law of Scattering; to evaluate the stability of the list and characterize the core journals.

Methods: Pharmacy practice faculty names were obtained from the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy. The 10-year (2014-2023) publication records (corpus) of faculty were obtained from Scopus.com. The core journals list of the corpus was established by using Verbal and Egghe's formulations of Bradford's Law. The stability of the list was evaluated by analyzing two 5-year, and five 2-year epochs of the corpus using a linear mixed-effects model to determine whether appearance in the core list depends on the epochs. The documents published in the core journals were classified with the Pharmacy Practice Research Domain Classifier tool which classifies documents into 4 domains (Clinical, Education, Social & Administrative, and Basic & Translational). The number of authors per document (NAPD) was also calculated.

Results: A total of 3028 (86.4 % of 3503) faculty published 23063 documents in 2470 journals during the decade. Bradford's Law produced 13 core journals (0.53 % of journals; containing 32.6 % of documents). The appearance of journals in the core zone was independent of the 2- and 5-year epochs. The research domain profiles of the core journals showed Clinical as the predominant domain in 7 journals. Two journals with distinct research domain signatures had the highest impact factors, CiteScores, and NAPD.

Conclusions: We established a novel, data- and theory-driven core journals list in pharmacy practice that is stable over a decade. This evidence-based list would help faculty in selecting journals to publish in, thus mitigating scattering, while also defining and finetuning the boundaries of pharmacy practice as a scientific field over time. The core journals list would be a catalyst for achieving the Granada Statements goals.