Stress in nurses: The 100 top-cited papers published in nursing journals

To identify and analyse the 100 most cited papers on stress in nurses published in nursing journals.

The number of citations an article receives is an index of its impact on the scientific community. An analysis of the most cited articles on stress in nursing would allow us to identify the most important articles and to obtain information about this area of knowledge.

A retrospective bibliometric analysis.

In 2016, 111 journals belonging to the "nursing" category were identified in the Science and Social Science Citation Index. A search was performed of the Science Core Collection Website for articles on stress published in these journals.

The topic, type of article, publishing journal, countries and institutions of origin and year of publication were extracted from the articles. The impact factor, immediacy index, journal country and publisher and h index were collected from the Institute for Scientific Information. The citation density, citation tendency and Bradford's law were calculated.

They identified articles were mostly empirical quantitative studies with a transversal design, published from 1975 - 2011 in 23 journals. They were signed by 233 authors, most of whom are English-speaking from the USA and UK. The core distribution of the publications comprises a single journal, the Journal of Advanced Nursing.

The study of stress in nursing has shown increased visibility and recognition each decade. The most recent articles have the highest number of citations, are the highest in rank and have the higher citation densities.