The Top Most-Cited and Influential Published Articles in Atrial Fibrillation from 1900 to 2019

Citation classics are widely being implemented in the field of medical and scientific research assessment. The frequency of citation of a particular article is used to gauge its contribution and impact on the clinical world of practice and research. A thorough search of the literature showed a lack of bibliometric analysis on atrial fibrillation (AF). Thereby the main purpose of this study is to pinpoint the trend of the top 100 cited articles on AF. In June 2019, 2 databases, Scopus and Web of Science, were used to acquire the articles published on AF, which belonged to various genres including medicine, medical and interventional cardiology, electrophysiology, and thoracic surgery. The data were thoroughly reviewed and analyzed by 2 reviewers with regards to the number of citations for each article, publications per area, document type, first author name, country of origin, institute of origin, and year of publication. Approval of the Institutional Board Review was not required as we used publically available data retrospectively. The number of citations in the top 100 articles ranged from 622 to 6,641 times with an average citation of 1041.3 per article. The most significant number of articles was published in the year 2004 which ranged up to 11 in total. All the articles are published in 21 English language journals. In these 100 articles, the most were from the United States (n = 63) followed by Canada (n = 24), and other countries (n = 17). The top 5 institutions include McMaster University (n = 9), Institut de Cardiologie de Montreal (n = 8), Population Health Research Institute (n = 8), Harvard Medical School (n = 7), and Mayo Clinic (n = 7). In conclusion, authors seeking to publish a highly referenced article on AF will be determined by source journal, the language of publication, geographic origin, methodology, or research outcome.