A new way to evaluate the impact of medical research

medical-researchdiversityresearch-metricsglobal-healthopen-access

Abstraction: Diversity factor metric for medical research beyond citation impact factor

Key points:

MIT's Leo Anthony Celi and colleagues propose a "diversity factor" to supplement the traditional citation-based impact factor, which fails to capture health equity
The metric incorporates author gender diversity, author geographic diversity (high- vs. low/middle-income countries), interdisciplinary team composition, and patient population diversity
Analysis of 130,000+ medical papers from 7,500+ journals (2000–2022) via the OpenAlex database found most papers scored poorly on the diversity index
80% of medical publications come from 20% of countries; clinical guidelines for major diseases derive almost entirely from studies in high-income nations
Open-access journals consistently outperformed non-open-access journals on diversity scores across the top 25 journals ranked by impact factor
NIH's AIM-AHEAD initiative is cited as an example of funding mechanisms that incentivize research team diversity

Connections: Mit · Research Metrics · Diversity In Research · Algorithmic Fairness