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CC BY 4.0 · Avicenna J Med
DOI: 10.1055/s-0045-1806761
Original Article

Can Research Articles Published in Medical Journals be Used as Expert Evidence in Medical Negligence Cases?—A Cross-Sectional Retrospective Study of Indian Court Judgments

Aakash Sethi 
1   Department of Radiodiagnosis and Imaging, Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER), Chandigarh, India
,
Kalpita Shringarpure
2   Department of Preventive and Social Medicine, Government Medical College, Baroda, Gujarat, India
› Institutsangaben Funding None.
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Abstract

Background The patient party is responsible for producing expert evidence to prove the negligence of a doctor, which becomes difficult due to lack of doctor's willingness to testify against other doctors. Impact factor (IF) is a surrogate to compare the quality of medical journals, which can be divided into low IF (< 10) and high IF (> 10). We aim to analyze various medical negligence cases where the medical journal was cited in court judgments on the parameters like court's verdict, IF of journals cited, compensation awarded, etc.

Methods This is a cross-sectional descriptive analysis. Judgments were accessed from www.scconline.com. IF was accessed from Clarivate Analytics 2019 ratings. Judgments having the word “Medical” AND “Negligence” in which either patient or doctor cited any journal data as evidence were included. The ci-square test was used as test of significance.

Results Twenty-six judgments met the inclusion criteria, with seven verdicts in favor of doctor (27%). The median IF was 2.455 with the New England Journal of Medicine having the highest IF (70.67). The median compensation awarded was 7.5 lakhs. The verdict of the court (doctor's win or loss) was not dependent on the IF (low IF or High IF) of the journal (chi-square = 0.16, p = 0.68).

Conclusion All types of courts handling medical negligence, viz., criminal court, consumer/civil court, writ court, and medical councils, accept medical journal research papers even as the sole evidence in the case of medical negligence. Most of the journals cited were low IF journals.

Keywords

malpractice - negligence - criminal law - medical ethics - standards of care - journal impact factor - practice guideline

Details of Earlier Presentation

None.


Authors' Contributions

• A.S.: Conception of design, acquisition, analysis, and interpretation of data, drafting, and revising the article.


• K.S.: Analysis and interpretation of data, drafting, and revising the article.


• Both the authors give the final approval of the version to be published.


Ethics

No humans or human data was used in the study and hence institutional ethics clearance was not taken. All the authors declare the research has been done conforming to the Declaration of Helsinki.




Publikationsverlauf

Artikel online veröffentlicht:
02. April 2025

© 2025. The Author(s). This is an open access article published by Thieme under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, permitting unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction so long as the original work is properly cited. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

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