The 100 most-cited articles on non-tuberculous mycobacterial infection from 1995 to 2015

Citation analyses aid in assessing quality, trends and future directions of research fields.

To identify the most influential articles on infections caused by non-tuberculous mycobacteria (NTM) in the last 20 years.

We performed a cited reference search of the Web of Science database from 1995 to 2015. The 100 most cited articles on NTM infections were analysed.

The top 100 articles were cited 114-1471 times, and were published from 1995 to 2013. Sixty-five were laboratory-based, basic science articles, with the major topics being pathophysiology (n = 20) and molecular methods for NTM identification (n = 15). Among the 35 non-laboratory studies, major topics were clinical management (n = 15) and epidemiology (n = 14). The top article was a clinical treatise on the management of NTM disease, published in 2007. Although there was a correlation between article rank and journal impact factor (P = 0.043, ρ = -0.202), the five articles from the journals with highest impact factors did not rank among the top 10 articles.

A large proportion of influential articles on NTM infection are basic scientific studies, and the most influential articles are not always published in high-impact journals.