- Julio Urrutia: Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, School of Medicine, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, Marcoleta 352, Santiago, Chile, jurrutia@med.puc.cl.
PURPOSE: The number of citations of an article is a marker of its academic influence. Several medical specialties, including orthopaedics, have ranked the articles with more citations. We identified the 50 most cited orthopaedic articles from Latin-America and analyzed the characteristics that made them citable.
METHODS: Science Citation Index Expanded was searched for citations of articles originated in Latin-America, published in any of the 63 journals in the category "Orthopaedics" from 1988 to 2013. We created a list ranking the 50 most commonly cited articles and determined the citation density (Citations/years since publication). Information noted for each article included authors, year of publication, country of origin, source journal, article type, and field of research.
RESULTS: Latin-American countries were the origin of 1% of orthopaedic articles. The top 50 most cited articles had between 29 and 150 citations (mean, 44.48); the citation density ranged from 1.43 to 15.5 citations/years (mean, 5.25). The articles were published in 19 of the 63 journals (11 general and eight sub-specialty journals), and all were published in English. Most articles (n = 29) were published in 2000 or later. The majority were clinical articles (n=40), and the most common fields were arthroscopy (n = 15) and hip surgery (n = 13). The top 50 articles originated mainly from Brazil (n = 20) and Argentina (n = 15).
CONCLUSIONS: This top 50 list displays articles that have become important references for the orthopaedic scientific community. Researchers may use this work to make their future publications more influential on future investigators.