Understanding the impact of public policy on cancer research: A bibliometric approach
Section snippets
Introduction: assessing the impact of public policy on cancer research activity
In 1937 James Ewing asked, in a Science editorial, whether public interest in cancer was intelligent and was being addressed along sound lines, or whether it was largely emotional and uncritical, and, of course, he could have added politicised.1 Some 70 years later cancer is arguably one of the most extensive biomedical research domains, spanning the whole public and private sector(s) with annual global public spend now in excess of 14 billion euros.2 The questions James Ewing proposed thus
Creation of the filter
Papers in cancer research (restricted to articles and reviews) were selected from the SCI by means of a ‘filter’ consisting of lists of specialist journals and title keywords. This filter, designated ONCOL, was designed by Dr. Lesley Walker, and revised by Dr. Lynne Davies, both of Cancer Research UK (formerly with the Cancer Research Campaign, CRC); it has a specificity (precision, p) of 0.95 and a sensitivity (recall, r) of 0.90, so that its calibration factor is p/r = 1.06. This means that the
Results
Sweden is one of the most research active countries in the world with a high ratio of researchers and spend (as a% of GDP) in comparison to the other countries in this analysis.
Sweden also has nearly double the output per million of population in cancer research publications compared to Canada, Germany and France. Of the four UK devolved regions Scotland is the most research-productive. Germany has seen the biggest rise in outputs (nearly 20%) with small increases by both Canada and Wales
Discussion
Our previous work has focused on understanding supra-national macro-trends in funding cancer research activity2, the move to nation-state level assessment is both novel and challenging. Quantitative methods are being used increasingly in research evaluation – at the national level, institutional level and even at individual level, though the latter application is particularly difficult. They are usually based on the numbers and other parameters of papers in the peer-reviewed serial literature.
Funding
European Cancer Research Managers Foundation (RS) and NIHR Biomedical Research Centres grant (ADP).
Contributors
R.S. initiated this study. G.L. was responsible for data collection, database design and collation of data. G.L. was involved in the analysis of the data. G.L., A.P., M.M., G.Mc.V. and R.S. were involved in its interpretation and the writing of this paper. R.S. and G.L. are the guarantors.
Conflict of interest statement
None declared.
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