A new way to evaluate the impact of medical research

The newly developed metric incorporates several factors, including the diversity of the paper authors (in terms of gender and geographic location), diversity of the patients studied, and how interdisciplinary the research team is. Credits : Image: Jose-Luis Olivares/MIT Evaluating articles and journals using a new "diversity index" could promote a wider range of perspectives and better global health outcomes, researchers say. Scientific journals and research papers are evaluated by a metric known as their "impact factor," which is based on how many times a given paper is cited by other papers. However, a new study from MIT and other institutions suggests that this measure does not accurately capture the impact of medical papers on health outcomes for all patients, particularly those in lowor middle-income countries. To more fully capture a paper's impact on health, metrics should take into account the demographics of the researchers who performed the studies and the patients who participated in them, the research team says. To that end, they have developed a metric that they call the "diversity factor." The new metric incorporates several factors, including the diversity of the paper authors (in terms of gender and geographic location), diversity of the patients studied, and how interdisciplinary the research team is. In a new study, the researchers evaluated more than 100,000 medical papers published in the last 20 years and found that most did not do well on this metric.