Clinical Guidelines

Clinical guidelines are documents that offer recommendations for clinicians and healthcare practitioners on how to manage and treat specific medical conditions or support decision-making in patient care. They are based on the best available evidence and expert consensus, and aim to reduce variation in practice and improve the quality of care.

In Altmetric, we track clinical guidelines as a separate attention source from policy documents. This is so we can support medical affairs professionals, funders, and academic researchers with understanding the practical applications and long-term impact of medical research. Being able to track research attention that comes specifically from clinical guidelines enables these users to inform funding decisions, measure impact, and identify practical applications of research.

While some of our policy documents may be described as “guidelines” (e.g. in document titles), the content we track as policy spans across a wide range of subject matters (e.g. public policy, international policy, economics, technology, science, etc.), as opposed to clinical guidelines, which are specifically connected to medical and healthcare topics.

The database of clinical guidelines we track attention from in Altmetric includes over 16,000 documents with research mentions at the time of launch (November 2024), with plans to continue growing over time.

Below are a few examples of document types we are able to track:

• Best Practice Guidelines

• Clinical Decision Support

• Clinical Guidelines

• Clinical Pathways

• Clinical practice guidelines

• Clinical protocols

• Clinical Standards

• Consensus guidelines / decisions / recommendations

• Consensus/Position statements

• Disease Management 

• Evidence-based Recommendations

• Evidence-based treatment guidelines

• Expert Consensus Statement

• Guideline Development

• Guideline Rapid Recommendation

• Healthcare Policy 

• Healthcare Protocols

• Preventive Care 

• Quality improvement standards

• Recommendations

• Proposed recommended practices

• Standardized Care

• Therapeutic Guidelines

• Treatment Guidelines

• Updates to guidelines published previously

The same way as we do for policy documents, clinical guidelines documents are searched for mentions via both link searching, identifier analysis and text mining.

Yes. Mentions in clinical guidelines are scored per source and have a default score contribution of 3. This means that if an output is mentioned in more than one clinical guidelines document from the same source (e.g. gov.uk), the score would increase by 3. However, if an output is mentioned in two clinical guidelines documents from two different sources (e.g. gov.uk and nhs.uk) the score would increase by 6.

On an Altmetric Details Page, the Clinical Guidelines tab lists mentions by time of publication in descending order, with the most recent ones available at the top of the page. 

The clinical guidelines appear as spearmint green in the Altmetric donut.