Relation between online “hit counts” and subsequent citations: prospective study of research papers in the BMJ

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Abstract
Evaluation of published medical research remains a challenge. Two classic yardsticks are the citation count (the number of times a given paper is cited by others)1 2 and the impact factor of the journal that published the paper (which reflects the average number of citations per article).2 3 However, the citation count can be assessed only several years after publication, and the impact factor is not paper specific and is thus virtually meaningless in assessing any given paper.3 Another measure, which can be obtained rapidly and is paper specific, is the “hit count” (the number of times a paper is accessed online). Whether this count predicts citations is unknown. I examined this issue prospectively in a cohort of papers published in the BMJ . The study used articles published in volume 318 of the BMJ (1999) in sections titled Papers, General Practice, and Information in Practice. The hit counts (full text articles, HTML version) for the main body of each article within a week of publication were provided by a …