Factors Affecting the Number of Citations to Clinical Therapeutic Articles Mentioning Level of Evidence

Abstract

Background: Level of evidence (LoE) is a hierarchical system for classifying the quality of studies. Objectives: This study examined the factors affecting the number of citations to clinical articles related to the treatment of human diseases that have included the LoE in their abstracts. Methods: A total of 3,683 therapeutic articles published between 2011 and 2013 that mentioned the LoE in their abstract and were indexed in PubMed and Web of Science were retrieved. The LoE and type of study design were extracted from abstracts and other bibliographic and citation information was obtained from PubMed and Web of Science databases. Independent samples t-test, one-way ANOVA, Pearson correlation test and linear regression were used to analyze the relationship between the variables. Results: Articles with level I evidence had the lowest frequency (290, 7.9%) and articles with level IV had the highest frequency (1,831, 49.7%). Five-year citations ranged from zero to 215, with a median of 13 citations. The median values of five-year citations from level I to level V were 20.5, 15, 14, 11, and 6 citations, respectively. Evaluation of the models to examine the factors affecting the number of citations showed that the change of evidence-level from level I to V reduced the number of citations (P < 0.001). Conclusions: Journal Impact Factor, LoE, number of references, number of authors, number of title words, number of pages, article type and subject category accounted for about 25% of the variation in five-year citations of clinical papers. Clinical papers with high LoE (levels I & II) received more citations over a five-year period than those with lower LoE (levels III & IV).

Healthcare Management: A Bibliometric Analysis Based on the Citations of Research Articles Published between 1967 and 2020

“…The number of authors attracts citation because it is considered that the higher number of authors of an article can determine more traffic for the paper, and so the chances of obtaining more citation are increased [ 30 , 31 ]. On the other hand, articles that cite more references and more publications referenced in different research platforms get a fairly large number of citations.…”

Factors influencing the impact of randomized clinical trials on dental implants: A bibliometric analysis

“…Furthermore, there are instances of citation manipulation practices aimed at increasing an author's h‐index, which can affect the reliability of the citation numbers as a proxy measure for overall quality (Bartneck & Kokkelmans, 2011). Numerous studies have explored the factors associated with citation rates in the dental and biomedical fields (Beydokhti et al., 2020; Cheng et al., 2017; Onodera & Yoshikane, 2015; Păduraru et al., 2022; Susarla et al., 2015; Vanclay, 2013). Although citation rates are a suitable statistical measure to assess the impact or utilization of the articles, it is essential to consider cautions and recognize its limitations (Onodera & Yoshikane, 2015).…”