by Yu-Chun Chen, Jau-Ching Wu, Ingo Haschler, Azeem Majeed,
Tzeng-Ji Chen, Thomas Wetter Studies that use electronic health
databases as research material are getting popular but the
influence of a single electronic health database had not been
well investigated yet. The United Kingdom's General Practice
Research Database (GPRD) is one of the few electronic health
databases publicly available to academic researchers. This study
analyzed studies that used GPRD to demonstrate the scientific
production and academic impact by a single public health
database. Methodology and Findings A total of 749 studies
published between 1995 and 2009 with ‘General Practice Research
Database’ as their topics, defined as GPRD studies, were
extracted from Web of Science. By the end of 2009, the GPRD had
attracted 1251 authors from 22 countries and been used
extensively in 749 studies published in 193 journals across 58
study fields. Each GPRD study was cited 2.7 times by successive
studies. Moreover, the total number of GPRD stud