(53) A Systematic, Bibliometric Investigation of Librarians’ Contribution to and Impact on Pharmacy Publications

Objective : The value added by librarians to health sciences scholarship is well documented; however, no study currently demonstrates the entirety of librarian contributions to pharmacy publications. This paper presents a bibliometric analysis of librarian and pharmacist co-authored publications to identify 1) scholarly contributions made by librarians to pharmacy literature, 2) patterns within co-authorship networks, and 3) gaps in the literature that point to future interprofessional scholarship opportunities.

Methods: The authors conducted a comprehensive literature search of six databases and hand searching by author names. All unique citations were screened and relevant citations underwent bibliometric analysis and data mining to map the distribution and pattern of the included literature, focusing on the citation impact, topic areas, document types, and the most represented institutions and authors. VOSviewer, Tableau, and Excel were used for analysis and visualization.

Results: 554 publications were included in the analyses. Librarians from 29 countries and 255 libraries contributed to the included publications, which were published in a total of 183 sources. The publications represent a wide spectrum of research topics and methods. Comparing the citation impact with similar publications in the same year and field, 77% of these studies have higher citation impact than average and 21% are in the top 10 percentile of citation impact rank. The Relative Citation Ratio of these papers is also slightly higher than 50% of NIH-funded papers.

Conclusions: Overall, this analysis shows that librarians are contributing to high-impact pharmacy research around the world, although the number of librarian co-authored publications is small when compared with the totality of pharmacy scholarship. The authors recommend more pharmacy researchers partner with librarians to increase publication quality and impact, especially for literature-based research.