As one measure of bench-to-bedside translation, iCite: Translation gives a count of the number of papers in this portfolio that have been cited by a clinical article. For primary research articles, citation in a clinical study is a strong indication that the knowledge generated by that study has transitioned into clinical research. Clinical articles are generally defined as Clinical Trials or Clinical Guidelines. Specifically, iCite: Translation uses Publication Type flags from PubMed to define clinical articles.
In the table of article-level data, if clinical articles have cited a paper in this analysis group, a link indicating the number of clinical citations appears in the “APT” Column (described in detail below). Clicking the link will bring up a PubMed results page with the list of clinical articles that cite this publication. iCite: Translation users should note that bench-to-bedside translation takes several years. For this reason, significantly fewer papers from recent years have been cited by clinical articles, even if they eventually will be. The graph below shows the proportion of papers published in each year that have been cited by a clinical study, using data through 2014:
In addition, when overlaid on the triangle of biomedicine heat map, which shows article density, the majority of publications that have citations by clinical papers can be found close to the Human tip of the triangle. These are most likely to be cited by a clinical guideline or clinical trial.
