Can the highly cited psychiatric paper be predicted early?

Predicting the impact of any research article on its scientific discipline is often viewed as requiring the passage of time. A recent BMJ article, however, reported that an article's citation rate at 2 years could be predicted by data available 3 weeks following publication. The question remains as to whether establishing a citation trajectory at an early stage holds for psychiatric publications, given the low percentage of psychiatric articles in their analysis. The aim of the current article was to critically examine this area of the scientific literature.

Data were collected from the Institute for Scientific Information on scientific papers published in January/February 2006, in the top 30 psychiatric journals. Analyses examined the comparative impact of early citation numbers and several predictors identified in the BMJ article.

Only two BMJ variables (a larger number of references per article and larger number of authors) predicted higher citations at 2 years in the principal analysis. Citation counts at 1, 3, 6 and 12 months predicted citations at 2 years, with increasing success over time, and such citation counts were distinctly superior to the quantified variables in the previous study.

It appears doubtful that data available at 3 weeks after publication for psychiatric articles are useful in predicting citation counts at 2 years. The trajectory of citation counts for a psychiatric article becomes more apparent with time.