Analysis of the 100 most-cited articles in periodontology.

AIM

The aim of the present study was to analyze two distinct biomedical electronic databases for the 100 most-cited articles in the field of periodontology.

METHODS

Two electronic databases (Scopus [SCO] and Web of Science [WOS]) were used to retrieve lists of the 100 most-cited articles using appropriately-chosen keywords. The correlation between the number of citations and age of publication was evaluated statistically.

RESULTS

Sixty-three papers could be found in both lists. The mean number of citations in SCO was 476.7 ± 361.9 and 371.2 ± 249.7 in WOS. The mean age of publication in the SCO list was 21.4 ± 9.4 years and 18.6 ± 6.5 years in the WOS list. No correlation was found between age of publication and number of citations for both databases.

CONCLUSIONS

There is a lack of evidence of the correlation between age of publication and number of citations. The concordance between the two databases that were reviewed was relatively significant, even though the rankings of the most-cited articles are dependent on the number of journals covered by one database. The actual value of the number of citations to measure the quality of one article should be carefully evaluated.