A Systematic Investigation of Librarians’ Contribution and Impact in Pharmacy Research, Education, and Clinical Care Through a Bibliometrics Approach

Objectives: The value added by librarians to health sciences research and scholarship is well documented in literature, however no study currently demonstrates the entirety of librarian contributions to pharmacy and pharmaceutical research, education, and healthcare delivery. This paper presents a bibliometric analysis of librarian and pharmacist co-authored publications to identify 1.) the 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. Overall, the paper will document librarian contributions as co-authors and add knowledge into the state of collaborative research between librarians and pharmacists.

Methods: The authors conducted a comprehensive search of the published and grey literature. The databases PubMed, Embase, Scopus, Web of Science, Library & Information Science Abstracts, and Dimensions were queried using a combination of keywords, subject headings, author affiliation terms, and journal names. All unique citations were screened to ensure they meet inclusion criteria of having at least one pharmacy co-author and one librarian co-author. Relevant citations underwent bibliometric analysis and data mining at the micro and macro levels to map the distribution and pattern of the included literature, including the trajectory of the literature over time, document type, citation impact, topic areas, and the most productive and collaborative institutions and authors. Bibliometrics tools VOSviewer, Tableau, and Excel were used for analysis and visualization.

Results: Database searches resulted in 2,644 unique citations and after screening 554 relevant publications were included in the analysis. Librarians from 29 countries and 255 libraries contributed to the included publications, which were published in a total of 183 sources. Most publications were review articles, including systematic reviews, scoping reviews, and meta-analyses, but original research and non-research papers were also found. The publications represent a wide spectrum of research topics, from clinical research, pharmacy education, drug research, the roles of pharmacy and pharmacists, health sciences and services, and animal-based lab research. After comparing the citation impact with similar publications in the same year and field, 77% of the included studies have higher citation impact than average (i.e., Scopus’ citation percentile benchmarking). The citation impact of these papers is also slightly higher than 50% of NIH-funded papers (i.e., Relative Citation Ratio).

Conclusions: Overall, this analysis shows that librarians are contributing to high-impact research publications around the world, although the number of co-authored publications to which librarians contributed is very small when compared with the number of publications produced by pharmacy researchers.