Comparative study of journal article scholarly activity: Pharmacy practice dual‐degree faculty versus single terminal‐degree faculty members

AbstractObjectiveThe goals of the 2005 National Institutes of Health (NIH) Roadmap of the Future of Pharmacy Colleges emphasized the importance of bidirectional information flow in translational research to enhance drug discovery and research. Many dual‐degree programs and pathways have been developed to meet this bidirectional information flow to enhance discovery and research, but limited data exists on the bibliometrics of these dual‐degree Department of Pharmacy Practice faculties. To determine whether dual‐degree programs enhance research, a four‐outcome bibliometric analysis of United States Departments of Pharmacy Practice tenure‐track (DPP‐TT) dual‐degree compared with DPP‐TT single terminal‐degree faculty was conducted over a 10‐year period.MethodsA search of PubMed of DPP‐TT single and dual‐degree faculty from January 10, 2010 to December 31, 2019 was performed. Faculty employed in DPP‐TT were determined through published rosters in the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (AACP) rosters or college/school internet sites. Department of Pharmacy Practice faculty members' number of publications, number of citations per publication, h‐index, and NIH iCite weighted Relative Citation Ratio (RCR) value were determined. Descriptive statistics and analysis of variance compared dual‐degree with single terminal‐degree DPP faculty data.ResultsNinety‐one institutions employed 348 DPP‐TT dual‐degree faculty that produced 7480 publications compared with 131 institutions with 1805 single terminal‐degree faculty of 12 670 publications. Dual‐degree DPP number of citations per publication (mean ± standard deviation [SD]) was 37.8 ± 86.8 with a journal impact factor (JIF) of 6.4 ± 14.3 compared to single‐degree of 24.7 ± 90.8 (p < 0.001) with a JIF of 4.7 ± 80.8 (p < 0.001). Dual‐degree faculty h‐index was 14.7 ± 12.5 with a mean iCite weighted RCR of 54.8 ± 87.6 compared to single‐degree faculty of 6.5 ± 8.9 (p < 0.001) with an RCR of 22.1 ± 65.3 (p < 0.001).ConclusionDepartment of Pharmacy Practice dual‐degree faculty have significantly higher bibliometrics compared with single‐degree DPP faculty.