Development and characterization of a theory- and data-driven core journals list in pharmacy practice

Area of Science:

• Pharmacy Practice Research
• Bibliometrics
• Scholarly Communication

Background:

• Identifying key journals is crucial for efficient research dissemination in pharmacy practice.
• Bradford's Law of Scattering provides a theoretical framework for identifying core publications.
• Previous studies have not established a stable, data-driven core journal list for US pharmacy practice faculty.

Purpose of the Study:

• To create a core journal list for United States pharmacy practice faculty publications.
• To assess the temporal stability of this core journal list.
• To characterize the identified core journals based on research domains and impact metrics.

Main Methods:

• Utilized publication records (2014-2023) of US pharmacy practice faculty from Scopus.com.
• Applied Verbal and Egghe's formulations of Bradford's Law to identify the core journals.
• Assessed list stability using linear mixed-effects models across 2- and 5-year epochs.
• Classified core journal content using the Pharmacy Practice Research Domain Classifier and calculated authors per document (NAPD).

Main Results:

• A core list of 13 journals was identified, representing 0.53% of all journals and containing 32.6% of the documents.
• The core journal list demonstrated stability, independent of the analyzed time epochs.
• Clinical research was the predominant domain in 7 core journals; two journals showed distinct domain signatures with high impact and NAPD.

Conclusions:

• A novel, stable, and theory-driven core journal list for pharmacy practice has been established.
• This evidence-based list will guide faculty in journal selection, mitigating publication scattering.
• The list aids in defining and refining the boundaries of pharmacy practice as a scientific field.