Animal versus human research reporting guidelines impacts: literature analysis reveals citation count bias

Abstract

The present study evaluated for the first time citation-impacts of human research reporting guidelines in comparison to their animal version counterparts. Re-examined and extended also were previous findings indicating that a research reporting guideline would be cited more for its versions published in journals with higher Impact Factors, compared to its duplicate versions published in journals with lower Impact Factors. The two top-ranked reporting guidelines listed in the Equator Network website (http://www.equator-network.org/) were CONSORT 2010, for parallel-group randomized trials; and STROBE, for observational studies. These two guidelines had animal study versions, REFLECT and STROBE-Vet, respectively. Together with ARRIVE, these five guidelines were subsequently searched in the Web of Science Core Collection online database to record their journal metrics and citation data. Results found that association between citation rates and journal Impact Factors existed for CONSORT guideline set for human studies, but not for STROBE or their counterparts set for animal studies. If Impact Factor was expressed in terms of journal rank percentile, no association was found except for CONSORT. Guidelines for human studies were much more cited than animal research guidelines, with the CONSORT 2010 and STROBE guidelines being cited 27.1 and 241.0 times more frequently than their animal version counterparts, respectively. In conclusion, while the journal Impact Factor is of importance, other important publishing features also strongly affect scientific manuscript visibility, represented by citation rate. More effort should be invested to improve the visibility of animal research guidelines.