Division of Neurosurgery, Toronto Western Hospital, University of Toronto, Canada.
J Affect Disord. 2011 Nov;134(1-3):39-44. doi: 10.1016/j.jad.2011.05.031. Epub 2011 Jun 8.
The biomedical literature is growing exponentially, with thousands of articles published each day. While the majority of published papers are of incremental value, every field also has a select, relatively small number of works that have presented important conceptual advances and have had a profound influence. We were interested in identifying such papers in the field of Major Depression.
To determine which and what type of articles in the field of Major Depression are citation classics, defined as having received equal to or exceeding 400 citations in the biomedical literature, as a surrogate marker for their impact in the field.
An online database of research publications was searched using a free, publicly accessible, and downloadable software. The terms "Depression" or "Depressive" were queried in the title of publications with no date restrictions. Out of scope publications not dealing with Major Depression or mood disorders were not considered.
243 citation classics representing the top cited manuscripts (approximately 0.1% of 240,000) in the field of Major Depression were identified. These highly cited works fell into six categories: scales/measures, medical psychiatry, clinical trials/management, mechanisms/translational studies, imaging investigations and epidemiological/population health studies. The journals in which citation classics are published are diverse, but typically are general psychiatric or medical publications.
Despite the size of the field, there is a relatively parsimonious collection of citation classics in the field of Major Depression. These deal primarily with the mechanisms and epidemiology of the disease, with papers dealing with depression management accounting for the fastest growing group of citation classics.
生物医学文献呈指数级增长，每天都有数千篇文章发表。虽然大多数已发表的论文都具有增量价值，但每个领域也有相对较少的精选论文，这些论文提出了重要的概念性进展，并产生了深远的影响。我们有兴趣在重度抑郁症领域确定这些论文。
确定重度抑郁症领域中哪些和哪些类型的论文是引文经典，定义为在生物医学文献中获得了 400 次以上的引用，作为其在该领域影响力的替代指标。
使用免费的、可公开访问和可下载的软件，在研究出版物的在线数据库中进行搜索。在出版物的标题中查询“Depression”或“Depressive”，没有日期限制。不涉及重度抑郁症或心境障碍的不相关出版物不被考虑。
确定了 243 篇引文经典，这些经典代表了重度抑郁症领域中被引用最多的手稿（约占 240,000 篇的 0.1%）。这些高引用的工作分为六类：量表/测量、医学精神病学、临床试验/管理、机制/转化研究、影像学研究和流行病学/人群健康研究。引文经典发表的期刊种类繁多，但通常是普通精神病学或医学出版物。
尽管该领域规模庞大，但在重度抑郁症领域仍有相对较少的引文经典。这些经典主要涉及疾病的机制和流行病学，而处理抑郁症管理的论文则构成了引文经典增长最快的群体。
