Network analysis of citation in hypertension clinical guidelines

Abstract

Recently the two most influential clinical guideline were published for diagnosing and treating hypertension in US and Europe: 2017 American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association (ACC/AHA) and 2018 European Society of Cardiology/European Society of Hypertension (ESC/ESH) Guideline. Though both of them have most in common, the differences in details between guidelines have confused many clinicians in the world. Because guidelines were evidence-based literature, through the analysis of articles cited in guidelines, these similarities and differences could be explained. Bibliometric analysis is a method of quantifying the contents of literature to analyze literature. So using the bibliometric analysis including co-citation network analysis, articles cited in guideline were analyzed. As a result, we figured out that bibliometrics can analyze the influence of the countries, authors and studies on the guidelines, which might affect on the similarities and the differences between both guidelines. © 2019 International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) and IOS Press.