Supporting evidence is essential for each product, but equally important is communicating that evidence to the relevant stakeholders. This is not only the responsibility of your marketing team, but also of the internal and external data teams that compile the evidence. Peer-reviewed journals, professional congresses, and expert meetings, where should evidence be communicated to make the biggest impact?
This question partly comes down to what you hop to achieve. To present work, garner feedback, and improve upon the product before final publication then congress presentations and expert meetings provide the best returns. The long-term impact of congress presentations is unknown, but a Cochrane review determined that only 44.5% of congress abstracts were published as full manuscripts. Still, it is hard to quantify the benefits of direct interaction and communication with your target audience in congresses and meetings. What the audience does with this information later is almost impossible to track.
To reach a global audience using academically accepted methods requires publication of a peer-reviewed manuscript. In academia, impact of a research manuscript has historically been measured by the impact factor of the publishing journal. It is clear though, that not all research in a single journal is of equal quality, and the NHMRC (National Health and Medical Research Council) stopped considering journal impact factors in 2008. More recently, impact measures have evolved to evaluate the sphere of influence that a publication has. One such measure is Altmetric. As collaboration and communication are moving more and more towards digital means, Altmetric tracks a range of public sources to assess how many people are talking about your research. Altmetric found that manuscripts published in Open Access have higher visibility than those behind a paywall, acquiring more Mendeley Readers and more monthly tweets. This holds true in traditional impact terms too, as a 1science study found that Open Access publications are over 50% more likely to be cited than those behind a paywall.
How does Coreva Scientific work to maximise research impact? As a recent example, our health economic model and meta-analysis on capnography monitoring were recently presented at an expert meeting of European gastroenterologists. The outcome, the professional body is reconsidering its stance on respiratory monitoring during procedural sedation in light of new information. The 2017 meta-analysis was published in BMJ Open, and is currently in the top 10% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric – a method of assessing the social impact and importance of scientific research.
“Altmetric has tracked 8,834,415 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 91st percentile”
Compared to articles published in the same source within ±6 weeks (587 articles), the meta-analysis manuscript has scored higher than 78% of its contemporaries. In the 8 months since publication, it has been read in full 1,865 times and downloaded 952 times. We are always happy to discuss options for publication as all our research work is performed using robust and academically sound methods, making it suitable for peer‑reviewed publication.