Avalilação PREreview de From Research to Impact: Assessing a Decade of CDC’s Public Health Science by Topic Area, 2014-2023

This paper presents a bibliometric analysis of publications of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the period 2014-2023. Being an expert in bibliometrics, not in the research fields covered by CDC, my review focuses on the bibliometric aspects of this paper, not on the substance of the research carried out by CDC.

From a bibliometric point of view, I consider this to be a sound and rigorous study. I don’t have any major comments on the paper. Below I provide a few smaller comments.

The section about topic modeling briefly mentions ‘representative publications’ in each cluster. It is not clear to me how these representative publications were identified.

The section about model quality assessment mentions 8 reviewers, but then provides a breakdown of the reviewers into categories that in total seem to include 9 individuals. Are there 8 or 9 reviewers? Also, I wonder whether the reviewers are authors of the paper. If they aren’t, I wonder whether their identities could be disclosed, for instance by mentioning the reviewers in the acknowledgments section.

In the same section, I struggle to understand the second stage of the review of the quality of the topic clusters. In particular, I am not sure how to understand the reviewers’ task to “blindly assign the topic labels created in the first stage to each paper”. Some clarification would be helpful.

“notably through the Relative Citation Ratio”: It is not clear to me why the authors specifically mention the Relative Citation Ratio. To my knowledge, other normalization approaches are significantly more popular than the Relative Citation Ratio. The most frequently used bibliometric analytics platforms do not include the Relative Citation Ratio, while they do include other approaches.

Regarding the analysis of policy citations, it would be helpful if the authors could offer a bit more reflection on the policy sources that are and aren’t covered by the databases used by the authors. It is important to know the extent to which the policy sources most relevant for CDC are covered or not.

Competing interests

The author declares that they have no competing interests.