Top Cited Articles in Dental Trauma; A Bibliometric Study

Aim: Citation analysis describes the impact that different articles in various fields of science have made by counting the number of citations they have received. This study aimed to identify those published articles in medical and dental journals that have exerted the most influence in the field of dental traumatology, as signified by their citation count. Methods: The 100 top-cited articles on dental trauma were identified in August 2014 by using the ISI Web of Science Database and Google Scholar. Search terms used included dental trauma, trauma to tooth/teeth, traumatic dental injuries and dental injuries. The 100 top-cited articles starting from the year 1950 were selected and analyzed with regard to authors, institution, country of origin, publication name, publication year, number of citations, field of study, study design and publishing group. Data was analyzed using SPSS version 19.0. Results: The highest number of citations that an article related to dental traumatology received was 480 while the last article in the list had 67 citations. The journal which had the most number of cited articles was Dental Traumatology, with the highest number of top cited articles being published in 2001. The first author who contributed most to the top cited articles was JO Andreason, with seven articles in total. According to the country of origin of the first author, the top-cited list was led by Denmark, with the University Hospital [Rigshospitalet] of Demark producing the highest number of most cited publications in dental traumatology. Forty percent of the studies were based on epidemiology with 70% having an observational study design. Wiley Online Library was responsible for publishing the majority of the articles in the top cited list. Conclusions: According to our citation analysis, it was revealed that most of the researches in dental traumatology have been based on epidemiology with surveys being the most popular study design. More studies need to direct towards prevention of dental trauma, with experimental study designs. Dental Traumatology may be the best journal to study dental trauma, as this journal has the highest number of top cited articles related to dental traumatology.