Prolific authorship in orthodontic scientific publishing

To identify the 10 most numerically prolific authors publishing in the field of orthodontics for each year over the last decade (2011-2020), describe the characteristics of these outputs and identify trends in the types of study being published.

A Scopus literature search was conducted to identify the 10 most numerically prolific publishing authors in orthodontics for each year during this decade. Number and characteristics of all publications for each author were analysed with descriptive and inferential statistics.

Forty-nine different individual authors were identified who were collectively prolific for between 1-8 years within the assessment decade. These authors published a total of 2025 papers, with a median annual output of 18 papers per year; however, half of these authors published between 15-24 papers per year (range 5-200). Amongst authors, 2 or more collaborated on only 7% of the identified papers. The median number of authors per paper was 5 (range 1-27) with significant variation according to study design (P < .001). The majority of authors originated from Brazil (19.3%), Italy (14.1%) and India (12.7%). Most papers described non-prospective clinical studies (38.1%), case reports or case series (11.1%) and narrative reviews (10.8%). Finally, prolific authors had a smaller annual output when publishing in orthodontic journals (P < .001) and when publishing experimental primary research (P = .04).

A cohort of prolific authors in orthodontics between 2011-2020 was identified. Extreme variation was found in annual output between these authors but case reports, non-prospective clinical studies and narrative reviews predominated.