Librarian involvement on knowledge synthesis articles and its relationship to article citation count and Journal Impact Factor

Abstract

Introduction: Our aim was to determine if there is a relationship between librarian involvement on a knowledge synthesis project and the synthesis’s citation count or the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) of its publication venue.

Methods: A total of 551 knowledge syntheses published during a one-year period (2020) from a single category, “Psychology, Clinical”, in Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports were exported from Web of Science along with the citation counts for each synthesis and the JIF of its publication venue. The full-text of each article was examined in order to code each as either co-author, acknowledged, or unknown to reflect the level of librarian involvement in the synthesis. The Wilcoxon Rank Sum test on bootstrapped samples was used to determine the significance of the results.

Results: Librarians were co-authors or acknowledged in 80 (15%) of the syntheses examined.  Analyzing two levels of librarian involvement (involved, unknown) indicated no relationship between the level of librarian involvement and the JIF of the journal nor the citation count the synthesis received since publication.

Discussion: There is no evidence of a relationship between librarian involvement in knowledge syntheses and the JIF of the publication or citation count of documents published in journals falling in the JCR category of “Psychology, Clinical” in the year 2020. Repeating this methodology in a different JCR category could help determine whether this lack of a relationship extends beyond the “Psychology, Clinical” category.