The 100 top-cited articles published in psychiatric journals

Abstract

An examination of top-cited articles is a tool that can be used to identify and monitor outstanding scientific research. The goal of this study was to identify and analyze the characteristics of the 100 top-cited articles published in international journals dedicated to psychiatry. The Science Citation Index Expanded provided by the Thomson Reuters Institute for Scientific Information Web of Knowledge was searched in December, 2011, and 128 journals were identified in the subject category "Psychiatry." Each journal was searched on the Web of Science under "Publication Name" and the results were sorted by category "Times Cited." The 100 top-cited articles were recorded, and the list was analyzed with regard to journals, number of citations, authors, year, institution, and country of origin. The original research articles of the 100 top-cited articles were classified into one of five categories: scale/measurement, descriptive/epidemiology, mechanism, management, and imaging. The 100 top-cited articles were cited between 26,578 and 781 times; they were published between 1957 and 2005, with the largest number (35) published in the 1990s. The articles appeared in 24 journals, with more than half published in the Archives of General Psychiatry (56), followed by the American Journal of Psychiatry (6), and Psychological Medicine (6). Articles that dealt with the development, application, or validity of measurements led the list of top-cited psychiatric publications (43) and had a significantly higher number of citations compared with the rest of the articles. The time and language of publication, field of study, country of origin, and journal in which the paper appeared are possible determinants of the likelihood of citation and impact.