Institution bias in the New England Journal of Medicine? A bibliometric analysis of publications (1997–2016)

This study is a partial replication of Delgado and Delgado (Scientometrics 115(1):607–611, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2584-7) that intends to examine the issue of institution bias in New England Journal Medicine with all its articles published across two decades (1997–2016). Normalized citations of Harvard based and non-Harvard based articles were compared and the effect size of the difference was found very small. That is, no home institution bias was found with a larger sample of data across a longer span in this study, which serves as a complement to Delgado and Delgado’s (2018) findings. Important issues such as how to define intitution bias and home authors are discussed, and suggestions for future research are provided.