We thank Matthew Stanbrook for his interest in our article.1 He offers some useful new information on citation counts that reinforces one aspect of our findings.
Readers may recall that citation counts were an ancillary outcome of our study. The primary outcome was clinical importance as rated by specialists with research training. By that measure, we demonstrated significant differences favouring expedited publication. As the closing paragraph of our article stated, “Our results lead us to conclude that policies for expedited publication are, on average, targeting important articles and may be contributing to the visibility of research findings” — a conclusion that is entirely in keeping with the global conclusion that Stanbrook makes in his letter. The new citation averages that he provides reinforce that assessment.
Stanbrook is perhaps defending the editorial status quo in claiming that overmatching is a “major flaw” in our study. In fact, it is precisely because the subject of study has a major impact on perceived clinical importance and citation counts that we opted for matched controls rather than randomly chosen controls. Had we randomly selected our control articles, readers could have rightly argued that we were making apple-to-orange comparisons that biased our results in favour of expedited publication.
In sum, articles selected for accelerated publication have, on average, higher ratings of clinical importance, and, as Stanbrook usefully elucidates, higher average citation counts. However, some control articles were rated as more important than case articles, a finding that should not be ignored or dismissed by journal editors. There may be better ways of capturing very important articles, and we thus reiterate that journal editors should continue to evaluate and refine their selection policies for accelerated publication.
William A. Ghali Department of Medicine University of Calgary Calgary, Alta. Jacques Cornuz Department of Medicine University of Lausanne Lausanne, Switzerland Finlay A. McAlister Department of Medicine University of Alberta Edmonton, Alta. Jean-Blaise Wasserfallen Department of Medicine University of Lausanne Lausanne, Switzerland P.J. Devereaux Department of Medicine McMaster University Hamilton, Ont. C. David Naylor Dean, Faculty of Medicine University of Toronto Toronto, Ont.
Reference
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