Journal article
Academic impact and research data utilisation of the Clinical Practice Research Datalink: scientometric analyses
- Abstract:
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Since its establishment in the late 1980s, the UK Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) has become one of the most widely utilised data resources in both national and international research. Its value lies in the richness, scale and quality of its routinely collected primary care data, as well as the availability of numerous linkable datasets.
This study provides comprehensive scientometric analyses of CPRD-related research output, impact, and data usage from 1988 to 2024. A total of 3,779 peer-reviewed publications were identified, and for 98.78% of them, enriched bibliometric metadata were retrieved through Scopus and Web of Science.
The UK emerged as the leading contributing country, with the United States and Canada ranking second and third. ‘McGill University’ was the most frequently affiliated institution, followed by the ‘University of Manchester’ and the ‘University of Oxford’, with seven UK universities among the top ten. The three journals most frequently publishing CPRD-based research overall, and since 2020, were ‘BMJ Open’, ‘Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety’ and ‘British Journal of General Practice’.
Analyses of primary care data sources utilisation revealed that overall, 86.35% of manuscripts used CPRD GOLD exclusively, 8.39% used both CPRD GOLD and CPRD Aurum, and 4.76% used CPRD Aurum alone, although recent years showed an increased use of CPRD Aurum.
Between 2016 and 2024, most articles (80.26%) were associated with CPRD research applications that referenced linked or CPRD algorithm-derived datasets. The three most frequently used were ‘Hospital Episode Statistics’ (69.77%), ‘Small Area Linkages’ (62.27%) and ‘Office for National Statistics’ mortality data (53.28%).
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 2.0MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1007/s10654-025-01347-1
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer Nature
- Journal:
- European Journal of Epidemiology More from this journal
- Publication date:
- 2026-01-24
- Acceptance date:
- 2025-12-08
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1573-7284
- ISSN:
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0393-2990
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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2348870
- Local pid:
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pubs:2348870
- Deposit date:
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2025-12-09
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Pineda-Moncusí et al
- Copyright date:
- 2025
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s), 2025. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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