Research citation analysis of Canadian Nursing Academics: 9‐year follow‐up

This study is a follow-up to an analysis of research citations of nursing academics in Canada that was conducted in 2009 (Hack, Crooks, Plohman, & Kepron, 2010). The goal of this earlier research was to describe the research publication productivity of these individuals using citation analysis, and in so doing, both honour these individuals and promote nursing research scholarship. Over the past decade, there have been additional efforts to describe and analyse the research citation rates of nurses in academia (Cleary & Hunt, 2010; Hunt, Cleary, Jackson, Watson, & Thompson, 2011; Martin-Del-Rio, Solanes-Puchol, Martinez-Zaragoza, & Benavides-Gil, 2018; Porter, 2018; Thompson & Watson, 2010; Watson, McDonagh, & Thompson, 2017; Wong, Tam, Wong, & Cheung, 2013). During this period the number, variety, scope and depth of indices used for this general purpose have grown, and these indices play an increasing role in evaluations of academic performance. In our ongoing effort to encourage academic excellence and foster recognition of scholarly leadership among nurse academics, we conducted a follow-up study to our 2010 paper, the findings of which appear herein. A list of 49 Canadian Nursing schools was compiled from the members list of the Canadian Association of Schools of Nursing (https://www.casn.ca/casn-members/) and author knowledge of Canadian Bachelor of Nursing degree granting nursing schools. The websites of each nursing school were then consulted to identify the currently active nursing faculty members employed at each institution. The Deans of each school were contacted via email to confirm the accuracy and completeness of their website's faculty listing. Twenty-four of 49 Deans (or Associate Dean designates) responded to our request to confirm their faculty list. Individuals holding primary academic appointments with rank—assistant professor, associate professor, full professor—from faculties and schools of nursing in Canada were included in the sample. Institutions with nonranking nursing faculty, including community colleges, were excluded, as were nurses primarily employed at hospitals but holding secondary cross-appointments with rank at faculties and schools of nursing. Individuals with adjunct, affiliate, or associate member status, and those holding cross-appointments or joint appointments in the nursing faculty/school, were included only if they held faculty rank in a primary, that is greater than 50%, academic appointment within the nursing body. Lecturers, instructors and Emeritus faculty members were excluded, as were faculty members who retired from their academic positions before 1 July 2017, and foreign visiting professors. The final sample consisted of 1,157 academic members. An initial search of each academic member was conducted in July 2017 using the Scopus database. Scopus has the broadest coverage available of scientific, technical, medical and social sciences literature with approximately 21,950 peer reviewed journals covered. The author search utility of the Scopus website was used to search the names of each academic member, to produce a list of their respective publications, total citation counts of all publications, and Scopus h-index score. The h-index, or highly cited index, is a count of the maximum number of publications that have each been cited an equal or greater number of times (Hirsch, 2007). For the analysis of citation counts, all publications published in all years for each author were retrieved. To provide a truer, that is noninflated, citation summary, the function to exclude the searched author's citations of their own publications was used in generating the total number of citations. Five top-30 lists were produced in August, 2017 from the information gathered from the initial search: (a) total citations for all publications; (b) total citations for first-authored publications; (c) citations received for each first-authored publication; (d) Scopus h-index for all publications and (e) Scopus h-index for first-authored publications. Where ties existed in the h-index values of researchers, researchers were ordered in the list according to their cumulative number of citations. Although Scopus strives to ensure accuracy and completeness in their reporting of published research, it is possible that errors or omissions occur. For this reason, the top 30 individuals in each category of interest—56 researchers in total—were sent a message via e-mail to confirm the completeness and accuracy of their discovered publications. Thirty-three of these researchers responded by providing their curriculum vitae which were then used to verify their Scopus publication lists. Given that a few months passed between the time of the initial database search and the writing up of the findings, the Scopus analysis was repeated during August 20–24, 2018 to generate the final lists of the top 25 individuals that appear in each list in this paper. Table 1 lists the top 25 Canadian researchers holding faculty rank in an academic nursing institution according to the number of career citations for all published journal articles. The researcher with the highest number of career citations is Dr. Bonnie Stevens from the University of Toronto (8,785 career citations), followed in second and third place, respectively, by Dr. Carles Muntaner from the University of Toronto, and Dr. Dawn Stacey from the University of Ottawa. Considering only first-authored journal articles (Table 2), the most highly cited researcher is Dr. Cindy-Lee Dennis from the University of Toronto (3,950 first-authored article citations), followed by Dr. Sally Thorne from the University of British Columbia, and Dr. Stevens. The difference between Tables 1 and 2 is that Table 1, by addressing all cited works, illustrates citation success for both lead investigator and co-investigator efforts, whereas Table 2, citing only first-authored publications, demonstrates solely lead author citation accomplishment. We recognize that well established researchers may encourage co-investigators to take the lead on publishing portions of their work, thereby reducing the number of first-authored papers for the established researcher. The 25 most highly cited journal articles that are first-authored by a faculty ranked researcher from a nursing academic institution are presented in Table 3. This table displays the important, perhaps seminal, papers that have influenced the empirical efforts of many researchers across scientific disciplines. Dr. Stacey holds the first and second positions on this list, with 727 and 591 citations, respectively, for these two papers. Dr. Alex Clark from the University of Alberta holds the third position. Dr. Stacey, Dr. Thorne, Dr. Dennis and Dr. Thomas Hack from the University of Manitoba each hold three positions in the top 25. Dr. Carole Estabrooks from the University of Alberta holds two positions on this list. The entire top 25 list is populated by 16 individuals, and three individuals (Drs. Stacey, Dennis and Thorne) together occupy 8 of the top 14 positions in this list. This list shows that an article cited at least 227 times is in the top 25 of all cited journal articles ever written by Canadian researchers currently holding academic rank in nursing. The top 25 researchers according to Scopus h-index are presented in Tables 4 (all papers) and 5 (only first-authored articles). Considering all published journal articles, the three researchers with the highest h-index are Dr. Stevens (h-index = 49), followed by Dr. Muntaner (h-index = 46) and Dr. Dennis (h-index = 43). The top three nursing academics based on their h-index for first-authored publications are Dr. Thorne (h-index = 32), Dr. Dennis (h-index = 31), and Dr. Stevens (h-index = 26). Thirty-two of the 49 academic institutions that were analysed are not represented by an academic member in any of the tables. There are 44 researchers (1 Assistant Professor; 8 Associate Professors; 35 Full Professors) appearing in at least one of these tables, representing 3.8% (44/1,157) of our sample. A comparison of the present and previous 2010 results shows that, when comparing the #1 positions on each of the citation lists, the number of career citations for all publications rose from 3,189-8,785; the number of career citations for 1st-authored publications rose from 2,201-3,950; the most highly cited 1st-authored publications rose from 620-727; the Scopus h-index for all publications rose from 26-49; and the Scopus h-index for 1st-authored publications rose from 17-32. These increases suggest a more general rise in the volume of research activity by nurse academics. While this may be the case, these increases may also be due, in part, to the increasing Scopus coverage of more journal titles over this time period, and the completion of the pre-1996 portion of the Scopus database. In our original 2009 article we noted that the Scopus h-index was based solely on articles from 1996 onwards. This restriction of the search parameter of the Scopus h-index was removed for the present analysis. An additional contributing factor to the rise in the magnitude of the citation metrics in the present analysis may be an increase the percentage of individuals holding academic rank of Full Professor (79.5%). These elevations may be a partial product of lengthier careers in academia, or an aging professoriate, as many of the Full Professors appearing in the tables of this paper held the rank of Assistant or Associate Professor in 2009. In publishing this follow-up report, we honour the nurse academics that hold spots on one or more of the lists herein. We also respect and value the researcher who, with few dollars, embarks on a research endeavour in pursuit of an answer to a research question borne of well-reasoned thought, using the best research design and associated methods. A commitment to scientific excellence to improve some aspect of our world and its inhabitants is meritorious regardless of any associated citation count or bibliographic metric. Despite the limitations of bibliographic indices of research productivity and success in nursing (Davidson et al., 2014), they remain as useful indicators of academic scholarship when used judiciously (Thompson & Clark, 2012). We look forward to developments in technology that will enable more sophisticated analyses of research products, including publication and citation metrics, towards the evolution of a growing worldwide base of academics in nursing whose research efforts, regardless of scope or scale, lead to enhanced learning and mentorship, and meaningful, lasting improvement in human health experiences and outcomes.

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