Can the impact of grey literature be assessed? An investigation of UK government publications cited by articles and books

An Exploration of Wearable Device Features Used in UK Hospital Parkinson Disease Care: Scoping Review

BACKGROUND

The prevalence of Parkinson disease (PD) is becoming an increasing concern owing to the aging population in the United Kingdom. Wearable devices have the potential to improve the clinical care of patients with PD while reducing health care costs. Consequently, exploring the features of these wearable devices is important to identify the limitations and further areas of investigation of how wearable devices are currently used in clinical care in the United Kingdom.

OBJECTIVE

In this scoping review, we aimed to explore the features of wearable devices used for PD in hospitals in the United Kingdom.

METHODS

A scoping review of the current research was undertaken and reported according to the PRISMA-ScR (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews) guidelines. The literature search was undertaken on June 6, 2022, and publications were obtained from MEDLINE or PubMed, Embase, and the Cochrane Library. Eligible publications were initially screened by their titles and abstracts. Publications that passed the initial screening underwent a full review. The study characteristics were extracted from the final publications, and the evidence was synthesized using a narrative approach. Any queries were reviewed by the first and second authors.

RESULTS

Of the 4543 publications identified, 39 (0.86%) publications underwent a full review, and 20 (0.44%) publications were included in the scoping review. Most studies (11/20, 55%) were conducted at the Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, with sample sizes ranging from 10 to 418. Most study participants were male individuals with a mean age ranging from 57.7 to 78.0 years. The AX3 was the most popular device brand used, and it was commercially manufactured by Axivity. Common wearable device types included body-worn sensors, inertial measurement units, and smartwatches that used accelerometers and gyroscopes to measure the clinical features of PD. Most wearable device primary measures involved the measured gait, bradykinesia, and dyskinesia. The most common wearable device placements were the lumbar region, head, and wrist. Furthermore, 65% (13/20) of the studies used artificial intelligence or machine learning to support PD data analysis.

CONCLUSIONS

This study demonstrated that wearable devices could help provide a more detailed analysis of PD symptoms during the assessment phase and personalize treatment. Using machine learning, wearable devices could differentiate PD from other neurodegenerative diseases. The identified evidence gaps include the lack of analysis of wearable device cybersecurity and data management. The lack of cost-effectiveness analysis and large-scale participation in studies resulted in uncertainty regarding the feasibility of the widespread use of wearable devices. The uncertainty around the identified research gaps was further exacerbated by the lack of medical regulation of wearable devices for PD, particularly in the United Kingdom where regulations were changing due to the political landscape.

A systematic method for identifying references to academic research in grey literature

Grey literature encompasses documents not published in academic journals or books. Some grey literature has substantial societal importance, such as medical guidelines, government analyses and pressure group reports. Academic research cited in such documents may therefore have had indirect societal impact, such as in policy making, clinical practice or legislation. Identifying citations to academic research from grey literature may therefore help assess its societal impacts. This is difficult, however, due to the variety of document and referencing formats used in grey literature, even from a single organisation. In response, this study introduces and tests a semi-automatic method to match academic journal articles with unstandardised grey literature cited references. For this, the metadata (lead author last name, title, year) of 2.45 million UK Russell Group university outputs was matched against a 100-document sample of UK government grey literature to assess the accuracy of 21 matching heuristics. The optimal method (lead author last name and title in either order, maximum of 200 characters apart) is sufficiently accurate and scalable to make the task of matching research outputs to grey literature references feasible. The method was then applied to 3347 government publications, showing approximately 23% of UK government grey literature in this study contained at least one reference to UK Russell Group university output, and of this grey literature, an average of 3.79 references were present per document. The applied method also shows that economics and environmental science academic research is most cited between 2010 and 2018.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11192-022-04408-4.

Assessing the Capability of Government Information Intervention and Socioeconomic Factors of Information Sharing during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Cross-Country Study Using Big Data Analytics

(1) Background: This study introduces a novel computational approach to examine government capabilities in information intervention for risk management, influential agents in a global information network, and the socioeconomic factors of information-sharing behaviors of the public across regions during the COVID-19 pandemic. (2) Methods: Citation network analysis was employed to gauge the online visibility of governmental health institutions across regions. A bipartite exponential random graph modeling (ERGM) procedure was conducted to measure network dynamics. (3) Results: COVID-19 response agencies in Europe had the highest web impact, whereas health agencies in North America had the lowest. Various stakeholders, such as businesses, non-profit organizations, governments, and educational institutions played a key role in sharing the COVID-19 response by agencies’ information given on their websites. Income inequality and GDP per capita were associated with the high online visibility of governmental health agencies. Other factors, such as population size, an aging population, death rate, and case percentage, did not contribute to the agencies’ online visibility, suggesting that demographic characteristics and health status are not predictors of sharing government resources. (4) Conclusions: A combination of citation network analysis and ERGM helps reveal information flow dynamics and understand the socioeconomic consequences of sharing the government’s COVID-19 information during the pandemic.

The high scholarly value of grey literature before and during Covid-19

New academic knowledge in journal articles is partly built on peer reviewed research already published in journals or books. Academics can also draw from non-academic sources, such as the websites of organisations that publish credible information. This article investigates trends in the academic citing of this type of grey literature for 17 health, media, statistics, and large international organisations, with a focus on Covid-19. The results show substantial and steadily increasing numbers of citations to all 17 sites, with larger increases from 2019 to 2020. In 2020, Covid-19 citations to these websites were particularly common for news organisations, the WHO, and the UK Office for National Statistics, apparently for up-to-date information in the rapidly changing circumstances of the pandemic. Except for the UN, the most cited URLs of each organisation were not traditional report-like grey literature but were other types, such as news stories, data, statistics, and general guidance. The Covid-19 citations to most of these websites originated primarily from medical research, commonly for coronavirus data and statistics. Other fields extensively cited some of the non-health websites, as illustrated by social science (including psychology) studies often citing UNESCO. The results confirm that grey literature from major websites has become even more important within academia during the pandemic, providing up-to-date information from credible sources despite a lack of academic peer review. Researchers, reviewers, and editors should accept that it is reasonable to cite this information, when relevant, and evaluators should value academic work that supports these non-academic outputs.

Gray Literature in Evaluating Effectiveness in Digital Health and Health and Welfare Technology: A Source Worth Considering

Background

The need to assess the effectiveness and value of interventions involving digital health and health and welfare technologies is becoming increasingly important due to the rapidly growing development of these technologies and their areas of application. Systematic reviews of scientific literature are a mainstay of such assessment, but publications outside the realm of traditional scientific bibliographic databases—known as gray literature—are often not included. This is a disadvantage, particularly apparent in the health and welfare technology (HWT) domain.

Objective

The aim of this article is to investigate the significance of gray literature in digital health and HWT when reviewing literature. As an example, the impact of including gray literature to the result of two systematic reviews in HWT is examined.

Methods

In this paper, we identify, discuss, and suggest methods for including gray literature sources when evaluating effectiveness and appropriateness for different review types related to HWT. The analysis also includes established sources, search strategies, documentation, and reporting of searches, as well as bias and credibility assessment. The differences in comparison to scientific bibliographic databases are elucidated. We describe the results, challenges, and benefits of including gray literature in 2 examples of systematic reviews of HWT.

Results

In the 2 systematic reviews described in this paper, most included studies came from context-specific gray literature sources. Gray literature contributed to the overall result of the reviews and corresponded well with the reviews’ aims. The assessed risk of bias of the included studies derived from gray literature was similar to the included studies from other types of sources. However, because of less standardized publication formats, assessing and extracting data from gray literature studies were more time-consuming and compiling statistical results was not possible. The search process for gray literature required more time and the reproducibility of gray literature searches were less certain due to more unstable publication platforms.

Conclusions

Gray literature is particularly relevant for digital health and HWT but searches need to be conducted systematically and reported transparently. This way gray literature can broaden the range of studies, highlight context specificity, and decrease the publication bias of reviews of effectiveness of HWT. Thus, researchers conducting systematic reviews related to HWT should consider including gray literature based on a systematic approach.

Barriers and facilitators of implementing an information system for health grey literature in Iran: Experts' views and perspectives

BACKGROUND

Despite the importance of health grey literature, there is not a comprehensive information system for managing these valuable resources in Iran.

OBJECTIVES

This study aimed at identifying the barriers to and facilitators of implementing a comprehensive national information system for health grey literature.

MATERIAL AND METHOD

This study applied the qualitative research method. Semi-structured interviews were conducted among 19 experts in related fields. A qualitative content analysis was used to analyze the data in MAXQDA. The data were codified and revised constantly and classified in some selected main and sub-categories based on their relative similarities and differences.

RESULTS

Data analysis identified some barriers to the implementation of an information system for health grey literature in Iran, including two main categories (and some sub-categories): managerial issues (performance related issues, coordination issues, monitoring and supervision issues and attitudinal issues) and issues on data integration (data collecting issues, data recording issues, quality control issues, and issues on data organization, dissemination and use).

CONCLUSION

Designing a national system for health grey literature in Iran needs a powerful authority, removing possible intersectional conflicts, a selection committee, written policies and strict quality control criteria, and protocols for storage, access, retrieval and metadata evaluation.