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Bibliometric Analysis of the Top 100 Cited Cardiovascular Articles

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The number of citations an article receives is an important indication of its impact and contribution to the clinical world. There is a paucity of literature concerning top article citations in cardiology. The main objective of this investigation was to bridge this gap and to provide readers a practical guide in evaluating the cardiovascular literature. Scopus Library database was searched to determine the citations of all published cardiovascular articles. One hundred two journals were included in our investigation under the Institute of Science Information Web of Science subject category “cardiology, cardiovascular, and heart.” We did not apply any time or study-type restriction in our search. The top 100 cited articles were selected and analyzed by 2 independent investigators. The journal with the highest number of top 100 cited articles was Circulation with 36, followed by 28 in the European Heart Journal. A statistically significant association was found between the journal impact factor and the number of top 100 cited articles (p <0.005). United States had the highest number of articles (49). Contrary to bibliometric analyses published in other medical fields, the largest subset of the cardiology articles (n = 42) was published in the 5-year period from 2006 to 2010. General medical journals such as The Lancet (n = 4) and The New England Journal of Medicine (n = 1) contributed only 5 articles to the list despite their extremely high impact factors. In conclusion, our analysis provides an insight on the citation frequency of top cited articles published in cardiovascular medicine to help recognize the quality of the works, discoveries, and the trends steering cardiology.

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Methods

In September 2014, we searched the Scopus Library database (www.scopus.com) for citations of published cardiovascular articles. One hundred seven journals were included in our investigation under the Institute of Science Information Web of Science subject category “cardiology, cardiovascular, and heart.” In this list, Stroke, Statistics in Medicine, Diabetes Care, Autoimmunity Reviews, and Anesthesia and Analgesia were not consistent with the focus of our investigation and, hence, excluded. No

Results

The number of citations for the top 100 cited articles ranged from 331 to 3,484 (Table 1). The median number of citations was 515 (interquartile range 391.25). The median number of authors was 12 (interquartile range 13.25). The top 100 articles were published from 1985 to 2013, with most articles (n = 42) published in the 5-year period from 2006 to 2010 (Figure 1).

The journal with the highest number of top 100 cited articles was Circulation, with 36 (Table 2) followed by European Heart Journal

Discussion

In our comprehensive list of the most highly cited articles in cardiovascular medicine, we found that the top 2 articles were guidelines regarding the management of arterial hypertension published by the European Society of Cardiology. Both these studies were the only articles to cross 3,000 citations. This is not surprising considering that hypertension is projected to effect 1.5 billion people in the next 10 years and is estimated to cause 9.4 million deaths annually.4, 5 These high numbers

Disclosures

There are no conflicts of interests. There was no commercial funding for this study. The authors have full control over all the data. The study will not be published elsewhere in any language without the consent of the copyright owners.

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