Guideline references and academic citations as evidence of the clinical value of health research

Abstract

This article introduces a new source of evidence of the value of medical-related research: citations from clinical guidelines. These give evidence that research findings have been used to inform the day-to-day practice of medical staff. To identify whether citations from guidelines can give different information from that of traditional citation counts, this article assesses the extent to which references in clinical guidelines tend to be highly cited in the academic literature and highly read in Mendeley. Using evidence from the United Kingdom, references associated with the UK's National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) guidelines tended to be substantially more cited than comparable articles, unless they had been published in the most recent 3 years. Citation counts also seemed to be stronger indicators than Mendeley readership altmetrics. Hence, although presence in guidelines may be particularly useful to highlight the contributions of recently published articles, for older articles citation counts may already be sufficient to recognize their contributions to health in society.