Evaluating the online impact of reporting guidelines for randomised trial reports and protocols: a cross-sectional web-based data analysis of CONSORT and SPIRIT initiatives

Enrique Orduña-Malea (), Adolfo Alonso-Arroyo (), José-Antonio Ontalba-Ruipérez () and Ferrán Catalá-López ()
Additional contact information
Enrique Orduña-Malea: Universitat Politècnica de València
Adolfo Alonso-Arroyo: University of Valencia
José-Antonio Ontalba-Ruipérez: Universitat Politècnica de València
Ferrán Catalá-López: National School of Public Health, Institute of Health Carlos III

Scientometrics, 2023, vol. 128, issue 1, No 18, 407-440

Abstract: Abstract Reporting guidelines are tools to help improve the transparency, completeness, and clarity of published articles in health research. Specifically, the CONSORT (Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials) and SPIRIT (Standard Protocol Items: Recommendations for Interventional Trials) statements provide evidence-based guidance on what to include in randomised trial articles and protocols to guarantee the efficacy of interventions. These guidelines are subsequently described and discussed in journal articles and used to produce checklists. Determining the online impact (i.e., number and type of links received) of these articles can provide insights into the dissemination of reporting guidelines in broader environments (web-at-large) than simply that of the scientific publications that cite them. To address the technical limitations of link analysis, here the Debug-Validate-Access-Find (DVAF) method is designed and implemented to measure different facets of the guidelines’ online impact. A total of 65 articles related to 38 reporting guidelines are taken as a baseline, providing 240,128 URL citations, which are then refined, analysed, and categorised using the DVAF method. A total of 15,582 links to journal articles related to the CONSORT and SPIRIT initiatives were identified. CONSORT 2010 and SPIRIT 2013 were the reporting guidelines that received most links (URL citations) from other online objects (5328 and 2190, respectively). Overall, the online impact obtained is scattered (URL citations are received by different article URL IDs, mainly from link-based DOIs), narrow (limited number of linking domain names, half of articles are linked from fewer than 29 domain names), concentrated (links come from just a few academic publishers, around 60% from publishers), non-reputed (84% of links come from dubious websites and fake domain names) and highly decayed (89% of linking domain names were not accessible at the time of the analysis). In light of these results, it is concluded that the online impact of these guidelines could be improved, and a set of recommendations are proposed to this end.

Keywords: Clinical trials; Reporting guidelines; Altmetrics; Article-level metrics; Webometrics; Link analysis; CONSORT; SPIRIT; Scientific impact; Online impact (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-022-04542-z Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:scient:v:128:y:2023:i:1:d:10.1007_s11192-022-04542-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11192

DOI: 10.1007/s11192-022-04542-z

Access Statistics for this article

Scientometrics is currently edited by Wolfgang Glänzel

More articles in Scientometrics from Springer, Akadémiai Kiadó
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().