The Top 100 Most Cited Articles Published in Dentistry: 2020 Update

Abstract

This bibliometric review is aimed to analyze the top 100 most-cited publications in dentistry and to compare its outcomes. A literature search was performed using Elsevier's Scopus, without any restriction of language, publication year, or study design. Of 336,381 articles, the top 100 were included based on their citation count, which ranged from 638 to 4728 citations (Feijoo et al., 326 to 2050). The most productive decade was the 2000s, with 40 articles on the list (Feijoo et al., 1980s: 26). Marx RE (7%) was the major contributor in this study (Feijoo et al., Socransky SS: 9%), and almost half (48%) of articles were from the USA. Of the top 100 articles, 26% focused on periodontology (Feijoo et al., periodontology: 43%), while 17% of the total were published in the Journal of Dental Research (Feijoo et al., Journal of Clinical Periodontology: 20%). Most of the publications were narrative reviews/expert opinion (36%), (Feijoo et al., case series: 22%), and were within the evidence level V (64%) (Feijoo et al., 54%). The citation count that a paper secures is not necessarily a reflection of research's quality, however, the current analysis provides the latest citation trends in dentistry.

Keywords: bibliometric analysis; citation analysis; dentistry; most cited.

Figure 1

Association of (A) citation count and (B) citation density with the age of publication. The dot represents individual publication and line represents trendline.

Figure 2

(A) Citation analysis of the top 100 most-cited articles over the decades. (B) The contribution of countries to the top 100 articles.

Figure 3

(A) Network visualization per author (Elsevier’s Scopus data 1980–2010). (B) Network visualization per count (Elsevier’s Scopus data 1990–2010). (C) Network visualization per journal (Elsevier’s Scopus data 1990–2010). (D) Network visualization per author keywords (Elsevier’s Scopus data 1990–2010).