Abstract
The publishing industry is a vast system whose elements form a metaphorical ecosystem with knowledge flowing through connections between heterogeneous elements. In this paper we seek a more robust understanding of different types of literature, and whether and how they support one another in the diffusion of knowledge. We analyze a corpus comprising professional electronic media in US dentistry and its relation to the peer reviewed journal literature. Our corpus includes full text from magazines, news sites and blogs that provide information to clinicians. We find links to research are made through several mechanisms: articles describing new clinical guidelines, referencing, summaries of recently published journal articles and crossover authoring. There is little to no apparent time lag in the diffusion of information from research literature to professional media.
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Notes
Inside Dentistry sometimes prefaces a name with "Dr." rather than listing degrees. So the dentist count includes such articles.
Inside Dentistry's article categories are not as informative.
The other 40% of Dental Dude posts are practice updates.
In this calculation, the year of publication was taken to be year 0, the year prior to publication as year 1 and so forth.
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Acknowledgements
This study was supported by the National Institutes of Health (Grant Number U19-DE-22516). The authors are grateful for the feedback provided by Ameet Doshi and Judith Williams. Opinions and assertions contained herein are those of the authors and are not to be construed as necessarily representing the views of the respective organizations or the National Institutes of Health.
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Hicks, D., Melkers, J. & Isett, K.R. A characterization of professional media and its links to research. Scientometrics 119, 827–843 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03072-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-019-03072-5