A new study suggests that the 'impact factor' used to evaluate scientific journals and research papers does not accurately capture the impact of medical papers on health outcomes for all patients, particularly those in low or middle-income countries. As an alternative, the researchers developed a metric that they call the 'diversity factor.' Evaluating articles and journals using a new 'diversity index' could promote a wider range of perspectives and better global health outcomes, researchers say.
Scientific journals and research papers are evaluated by a metric known as their"impact factor," which is based on how many times a given paper is cited by other papers. However, a new study from MIT and other institutions suggests that this measure does not accurately capture the impact of medical papers on health outcomes for all patients, particularly those in low- or middle-income countries.
"The medical knowledge system is controlled by a very noninclusive group of academics, and it's not diverse at all," says Leo Anthony Celi, To quantify the extent of this problem, the researchers created an index based on several factors. One factor is the diversity of the authors of a study, including whether the authors are located in a high-income country or a low- and middle-income country. The researchers also used an algorithm that categorized the authors as male or female.
The final metric that the researchers proposed is based on the diversity of traits of patients included in a given study, including sex, race-ethnicity, language, age, and geography. However, because many of the papers analyzed in this study were not open-access, the researchers could not get this information for many of the papers and so did not include it in their final analysis.
The researchers also found a lack of geographic diversity. For papers published in 2021, there were more than 5 million authors from high-income countries, 1.5 million from upper-middle-income countries, about 470,000 from lower-middle-income countries, and just over 27,000 from low-income countries.
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