Type of empirical research reports as an explanatory factor in citation performance of psychiatric research

In all fields of human sciences there has long been a debate whether research of these fields should closely follow the traditional method with accurate measurements and statistical inference. More qualitative approaches have been proposed, by which is ment that the research aim is to use the data in their qualitative form. The purpose of this study was to describe the differences in citations between qualitative and quantitative empirical reports. A total of 262 published reports of research pertaining to the therapeutic community and psychiatric wards in a variety of treatment settings from 1987 to 1992 were analyzed. The main finding of this study was that quantitative reports were more frequently cited than qualitative ones — also when some confounding factors were controlled.

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