Ten years of minimally invasive access cavities in Endodontics: a bibliometric analysis of the 25 most-cited studies

Abstract

Objectives: This study aimed to analyze the main features of the 25 most-cited articles in minimally invasive access cavities.

Materials and methods: An electronic search was conducted on the Clarivate Analytics' Web of Science 'All Databases' to identify the most-cited articles related to this topic. Citation counts were cross-matched with data from Elsevier's Scopus and Google Scholar. Information about authors, contributing institutions and countries, year and journal of publication, study design and topic, access cavity, and keywords were analyzed.

Results: The top 25 most-cited articles received a total of 572 (Web of Science), 1,160 (Google Scholar) and 631 (Scopus) citations. It was observed a positive significant association between the number of citations and age of publication (r = 0.6907, p < 0.0001); however, there was no significant association regarding citation density and age of publication (r = -0.2631, p = 0.2038). The Journal of Endodontics made the highest contribution (n = 15, 60%). The United States had the largest number of publications (n = 7) followed by Brazil (n = 4), with the most contributions from the University of Tennessee and Grande Rio University (n = 3), respectively. The highest number of most-cited articles were ex vivo studies (n = 16), and 'fracture resistance' was the major topic studied (n = 10).

Conclusions: This study revealed a growing interest for researchers in the field of minimally invasive access cavities. Future trends are focused on the expansion of collaborative networks and the conduction of laboratory studies on under-investigated parameters.

Keywords: Bibliometric analysis; Citation; Conservative endodontic cavity; Endodontics.

Figure 1. Association of citation count with age of publication.

Figure 2. Association of citation density with age of publication.

Figure 3. The journals of publication of the top 25 most-cited articles of minimally invasive endodontic access.

Figure 4. Authors that contributed with 2 or more articles in the top-cited papers and their collaboration networks: a node represents an author; the size of the node represents the number of articles in the top-cited list; a link shows collaboration and nodes with the same color represent collaborating clusters; the distance and thickness of the link between nodes show the relative strength of the relation.

Figure 5. Overlay visualization of the term map of the most frequent terms related to the main research topic of the top 25 most-cited articles: the colors of the nodes and clusters are related to the year of publication of the articles; the size of the node represents the frequency of citation of the term; the distance and thickness of the link between nodes show the relative strength of the relation.

Figure 6. Density visualization of the keyword co-occurrence map. Data were extracted from the unique keywords of the top 25 most-cited articles; red color represents the terms that received higher amount of citation.