Peri-implantitis: A bibliometric network analysis of top 100 most-cited research articles.

BACKGROUND

Over the past decades, there has been an increase in research publications focusing on peri-implantitis. When facing limited healthcare resources, bibliometric analyses can guide researchers and funding parties toward areas where reallocation or more focus on research activity is warranted. The main objective of this study was to identify the trends of the top 100 cited articles on peri-implantitis research as the first study of its kind.

METHODS

A Web of Science search, using the keywords "peri-implantitis or periimplantitis" was built to create a database of the most-cited articles. Articles were ranked by citation count and screened by two independent reviewers. The bibliometric characteristics of the studies were gathered and analyzed using several bibliometric software. Author collaborations, author clusters, and keyword co-occurrence network analyses were also performed. The correlation between the citation count and the age of each article was tested.

RESULTS

The top 100 cited papers were published from 1994 to 2018 and the total citation counts ranged from 119 to 972 with 244.5 citations/paper on average. There was no correlation between the age of the articles and the citation count (p-value = 0.67). 21% of the studies consisted of prospective clinical studies. 35% of the papers focused on treatment and prevention of peri-implantitis while 65% concerned epidemiology. The top three most prolific countries were Sweden (n = 31), Germany (n = 15), and Switzerland (n = 13). We found 12 authors who had greater than five publications on the list. Also, the most published journal was Clinical Oral Implants Research.

CONCLUSION

This study provides insight into the characteristics and quality of the most highly cited peri-implantitis literature. This revealed a deficiency in terms of the number of studies on treatment strategies as well as a higher level of evidence studies among the most- impactful papers on peri-implantitis at the moment.