The most downloaded and most cited articles in radiology journals: a comparative bibliometric analysis

To evaluate and compare the characteristics of the most downloaded and most cited articles in radiology journals.

We selected 41 radiology journals that provided lists of both the most downloaded and most cited articles on their websites, and identified the 596 most downloaded articles and 596 most cited articles. We compared the following characteristics of the most downloaded and most cited articles: year of publication, journal title, department of the first author, country of origin, publication type, radiologic subspecialty, radiologic technique and accessibility.

Compared to the most cited articles, the most downloaded articles were more frequently review articles (36.1% vs 17.1%, p < 0.05), case reports (5.9% vs 3.2%, p < 0.05), guidelines/consensus statements (5.4% vs 2.7%, p < 0.05), editorials/commentaries (3.7% vs 0.7%, p < 0.05) and pictorial essays (2.0% vs 0.2%, p < 0.05). Compared to the most cited articles, the most downloaded articles more frequently originated from the UK (8.7% vs 5.0%, p < 0.05) and were more frequently free-access articles (46.0% vs 39.4%, p < 0.05).

Educational and free-access articles are more frequent among the most downloaded articles.

• There was only small overlap between the most downloaded and most cited articles. • Educational articles were more frequent among the most downloaded articles. • Free-access articles are more frequent among the most downloaded articles.