Anatomy of success: 100 most cited articles in diabetes research.

INTRODUCTION: The number of citations an article receives is an important indication of its impact and its contribution to academia. There is a paucity of literature concerning top article citations in diabetes. The main objective of this investigation was to bridge this gap and to provide readers with a practical guide in evaluating diabetes literature.

METHODS: Scopus Library was searched to determine the citations of all published diabetes articles. A total of 100 articles were included in our investigation under the subject category 'Diabetes, diabetes mellitus, and diabetics'. Two databases were used to extract citations. We did not apply any time restriction in our search. The top 100 cited articles were selected and analyzed by two independent investigators. We extracted immediacy index from ResearchGate.

RESULTS: The journal with the highest number of top 100 cited articles was The New England Journal of Medicine with 23, followed by 22 in Diabetes Care. The top article on the list received 17,779 citations. A statistically significant association was found between the journal impact factor and the number of top 100 cited articles (p < 0.005). The United States had the highest number of articles (59). Contrary to bibliometric analyses published in other medical fields, the largest subset of the diabetes articles (n = 54) were published in the 10-year period between 2000 and 2009.

CONCLUSION: Our analysis provides an insight on the citation frequency of top cited articles published in diabetes to help recognize the quality of the works, discoveries and the trends steering the study of diabetes.