The 'translational' effect in medical journals: Bridging the gap?

The objective of translational research is to harness knowledge from basic research to develop new drugs and treatments and better patient care. For already two decades it is a 'hot' topic in academia and in policy-making circles. However, few bibliometric studies have been carried out to make the characteristics of translational research visible. In this article, an analysis is presented of publications in journals, covering translational medical research and processed for the Web of Science. These publications do not have more references or citations to basic (biomedical) research than those in the other journals assigned to the same subject categories. Neither were significant differences observed between these two journal sets in the noun phrases used in the papers' abstracts, except for the abundant use of the adjective 'translational' in papers published in medical journals with the adjective 'translational' in the journal title. However, the results published in these journals seem to be the results more of collaborative research between different types of organizations than the average paper in the corresponding subject category.