Highly cited dental articles and their authors: An evaluation of publication and citation characteristics

Aim: In the present study, we aimed to identify and analyze the characteristics of highly cited articles in dentistry.

Methods: All articles belonging to Web of Science category of "dentistry, oral surgery and medicine" published until 2016 were analyzed. The bibliometric data of the highly cited articles were evaluated. The Y-index was applied to assess authors' publication potential. Altmetric scores were recorded from Dimensions, a free online database.

Results: There were 3666 highly cited dentistry articles published in dental journals. Half of them were published in seven leading journals in their specialties. The major contributing countries were the USA, Sweden, the UK, and Switzerland. The highly cited articles were written by 3.7 authors on average. Jan Lindhe had the largest number of highly cited articles, whereas David H. Pashley had the highest potential to publish highly cited articles in dentistry.

Conclusions: Highly cited articles were distributed among various dental specialties, and the most productive periods were the late 1990s and the early 2000s. The Y-index gave dimensional details of the prolific authors. The current analysis was based on data extracted from Web of Science. Results could be different if data were extracted from other databases, such as Google Scholar.