Benchmarking bibliometrics in biomedical research: research performance of the University of Torontos Faculty of Medicine, 20082012
Bibliometrics are often used as key indicators when evaluating academic groups and individual researchers in biomedical research. Citation metrics, when used as indicators of research performance, require accurate benchmarking for homogenous groups. This study describes the research performance of academic departments in the University of Torontos Faculty of Medicine using article-level bibliometrics for scientific papers published from 2008 to 2012. Eligible publications of all academic faculty members were verified from each researchers curriculum vitae and Web of Science (Thomson Reuters). For 3792 researchers, we identified 26,845 unique papers with 79,502 authors published from 2008 to 2012. The overall mean citations per paper for the faculty was 17.35. The academic departments with the highest levels of collaboration and interdisciplinary research activity also had the highest research impact. The citationwindow for biomedical scientific papers was still active at 5years afterpublication, indicating that the citation window for publications in biomedical research is active longer than previously thought, and this may hinder the reliable use of bibliometrics when evaluating recent scientific publications in biomedical research.
benchmarking biomedical research research impact citation window research productivity