OPINION PIECE (wileyonlinelibrary.com) doi: 10.1002/leap.1183 Received: 6 April 2018 | Accepted: 15 June 2018 | Published online in Wiley Online Library: 16 July 2018 Measuring regional impact: The case for bigger data Camillo Lamanna , * and Stevan Bruijns Division of Emergency Medicine, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa ORCID: C. Lamanna: 0000-0002-8522-354X S. Bruijns: 0000-0001-7805-7347 *Corresponding author: Camillo Lamanna E-mail: camillolamanna@gmail.com Key points • It is currently not possible to measure the impact of research within a specific region. • There are both practical and philosophical reasons why online views may be preferable to citations for measuring the regional impact of clinical research. • With only a few changes to existing data collection strategies, a new regional impact metric could be created. • A reliable regional impact metric would allow local clinicians to discover practical context-appropriate research and local librarians to identify regionally impactful journals. INTRODUCTION Global research impact can be measured using a diverse and ever-growing array of tools. Impact can be analysed with respect to the journal, the research institution, or the individual scholar from which research outputs emanate. However, we do not currently have metrics to measure the impact of research in individual geographical regions. Why would regional impact met- rics be useful? Research outputs tend to concentrate in a rela- tively small area: the USA and Europe. In our field, emergency medicine, this area delivers nearly 60% of all research outputs recorded on Scopus despite making up less than 20% of the global population. Time and again it has been found that the findings from a high-income setting do not translate to the low- income setting: patients differ, pathogens vary, and infrastruc- tures diverge in their human, physical, and technological resources. Quite literally, what is life-saving in Los Angeles may be lethal in Lusaka (Andrews et al., 2017). In low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), identifying the journals with greatest regional impact would enable local librarians to identify the most regionally impactful journals, local clinicians to discover context-appropriate research (to translate into practice), and local policy-makers to direct the regional research agenda accordingly. Perhaps most importantly, identify- ing the most influential research outputs within individual regions may act as a stimulus for regional research in LMICs and thus begin to redress the research imbalance between the West and the rest. REMONSTRATIONS ABOUT CITATIONS How should one begin to construct a regional impact metric? Currently, the impact of clinical research is primarily measured using citation-based metrics. In general, these metrics are not set up to capture regional impact as there is no geographical nuance in citation calculations: a citation from Africa is given the same weight as a citation from Europe. This lack of granularity masks wide variations in the influence of research across regional con- texts. A regional impact metric for Africa, for instance, should be designed so that a citation from Cameroon carries more weight than a citation from Canada. One faces a preliminary hurdle, however, when one tries to define where a citation is ‘from’. A citation is a binary relation between two entities: the original output (and its author(s)) and the citing output (and its author(s)). As a first pass, one may iden- tify the geographical location of impact by examining the affilia- tion of the original output’s author. Some citation databases, like Scopus, do exactly this in order to generate research rankings for different countries and world regions. However, this approach immediately leads to counterintuitive results: a paper written by US-based authors about a research project conducted in Rwanda will show no African impact according to the Scopus regional measure even if cited widely by Rwandan researchers. Hence it seems that regional impact cannot be reliably established by examining the affiliation of the original author. Maybe, then, it would be more fruitful to locate research impact using the affiliation of the citing author. According to this Learned Publishing 2018; 31: 413–416 www.learned-publishing.org © 2018 The Author(s). Learned Publishing © 2018 ALPSP. 413