United States Family Medicine research collaborations associated with higher citation and funding rates
Vivian Jiang 1 2 6 , Stephen Petterson 3 , Elizabeth Wilkinson 3 , Alison Shmerling 1 , Yalda Jabbarpour 3 , Andrew Bazemore 4 , Winston Liaw 51 Department of Family Medicine, University of Colorado, Denver, CO, USA.
2 Family Medicine for America’s Health, Fairfax, VA, USA.
3 Robert Graham Center for Policy Studies in Family Medicine and Primary Care, Washington, D.C., USA.
4 American Board of Family Medicine, Washington, D.C., USA.
5 Department of Health Systems and Population Health Sciences, University of Houston College of Medicine, Houston, TX, USA.
6 Corresponding author. Email: Vivian.Jiang@cuanschutz.edu
Journal of Primary Health Care 13(3) 238-248 https://doi.org/10.1071/HC20136
Published: 13 August 2021
Journal Compilation © Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners 2021 This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: Among academic medical disciplines, Family Medicine (FM) research is notable for its breadth of health-care content areas, making it particularly susceptible to interdisciplinary collaboration.
AIM: This study characterises the degree and typology of such collaborations, and determines whether collaboration patterns are associated with citation frequency and funding.
METHODS: This cross-sectional study describes collaboration patterns for publications from 2015 indexed in Web of Science and authored by faculty from United States (US) departments of family medicine (DFMs). We determined mean number of total and FM authors per publication, and percentage of publications with FM first or last authors. Publications were categorised by inclusion of non-FM faculty author(s) and number of DFMs represented.
RESULTS: Overall, 919 FM faculty from 109 DFMs authored a total of 1872 unique publications in 2015. There was an average of 6.8 authors per publication with 1.4 authors being FM faculty. FM faculty were first author on 26.2% and last author on 29.2% of publications. Of all publications, 0.9% were single FM Author; 1.0% were same DFM; 0.3% were multiple DFMs; 72.4% were single FM Author+non-FM; 19.3% were same DFM+non-FM; 6.0% were multiple DFMs+non-FM. FM publications with non-FM faculty authors showed higher citation rates, higher rates of funding, and lower rates of having no funding source.
DISCUSSION: Most FM publications involved non-FM faculty authors. Collaborations involving non-FM authors were correlated with higher impact publications and projects that were more likely to have been funded.
KEYwords: Collaborations; collaborative research; team science; family medicine research; academic medicine.
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