A bibliometric and Altmetric analysis of the 100 top most cited articles on dentin adhesives

Abstract

Objective: This study aimed to identify the 100 top-cited articles on dentin adhesives utilizing comprehensive bibliometric and altmetric analyses.

Materials and methods: The Institute of Scientific Information Web of Knowledge database was used to compile the top-cited articles published from 1945 through February 12, 2023. Citation counts were manually retrieved for each article from Scopus, Google Scholar, Dimensions, and Altmetric. The articles were analyzed in terms of their number of citations, year, journal name, author (name, institution, and country), and type and specific field of study. We used descriptive statistics to summarize the results.

Results: The analysis revealed that the top 100 cited articles originated from 18 English-language journals and collectively accumulated a remarkable 34526 citations. The article with the highest number of citations garnered 1288 references. Among authors, Van Meerbeek B. stood out with nine articles and 4650 citations, followed by Pashley D.H. with six articles and 2769 citations. Japan was the leading contributor by country, while the Catholic University of Leuven led in terms of institutions with 20 articles.

Conclusion: According to this study, basic research and review articles garnered the most citations, respectively. The citation analysis revealed different trends for researchers, the first being that researchers have focused on basic fields such as the ultramorphology of dentin and adhesive interfaces, followed by bond strength to dentin. Two studies on clinical experiences suggested that studies with high-level evidence, such as systematic reviews, meta-analyses, or randomized controlled clinical trials, are required.

Clinical relevance: It is identified that more studies with high-level evidence-based research are needed in the field of dental adhesives.

Keywords: Altmetric; Bibliometric; Citation analysis; Dentin adhesive; Restorative dentistry.

Fig. 1

Journal citation map of the 101 most cited articles; bubbles indicate the number of publications and colour indicates the average normalised citation. (Using VOSviewer interface, in the 'Overlay Visualisation' section, "LinLog/modularity" was selected as the analysis method, the number of articles contributed by the journals as 'Weights' and the average normalised citation count as ‘Scores’)

Fig. 2

The number of articles by years and the total number of citations of the top 100 articles by years

Fig. 3

A co-authorship map shows all the contributor authors of the 101 top-cited articles. From VOSviewer interface; in analysis option “LinLog/modularity” selected as normalization method and in the ‘Weights’ drop-down list from Visualization section, ‘Documents’ option was selected to determine the label sizes of the authors depending on the number of articles to which they contributed