An analysis of the most-cited research papers on oncology: which journals have they been published in?

The most-cited papers (MCPs) are likely those that impressed researchers and had profound influence on clinical practice or future developments in the related scientific field. This study was conducted to explore a bibliometric approach to assess where the oncology-related MCPs have been published in. The source of the data presented in this study was provided by using the InCitesTM, Web of Science, Thomson Reuters Database (2013). It contained any journal indexed by ISI between 1979 and 2013. The term MCPs arbitrarily defined as equal or more than 100 citations. A total of 565 publications were cited equal or more than 100 times. They were published in 79 different journals (64 oncology, 12 medicine, and 3 science), led by the Journal of Clinical Oncology (n = 76; 13.5%) and Cancer Research (n = 66; 11.7%) followed by Oncogene (n = 46; 8.1%), Nature Reviews Cancer (n = 41; 7.3%), and Cancer (n = 37; 6.5%). Moreover, the journal categories with the MCPs were the Oncology with 495 articles (87.6%), followed by the Medicine with 60 (10.6%) articles. However, the numbers of journals related to Science (n = 10; 1.8%) were the least. The MCPs were cited a total of 118,531 times. The citations ranged from 100 to 1,790, and the median number was 149. The total numbers of MCPs were the most prominent for the journals, the New England Journal of Medicine (median 398), Lancet (median 213), and Nature Reviews Cancer (median 210). In other side, the counts of MCPs were the highest for the Science and Medicine-categorized journals (median 212.5 and 192.5 citations, respectively). The MCPs categorized as Oncology were the least cited (median 145). The median number of MCPs per year was 18.7 with range 4.1-858.5. The annual most valuable MCPs were also published in the journal Nature Reviews Cancer (median 42) and the New England Journal of Medicine (median 38.7). Likewise, the numbers of MCPs were the highest for the Science-categorized journals (median 37), whereas the citations per year were significantly lower in Medicine and Oncology-categorized journals (25.8 and 17.8, respectively). In conclusion, most of the MCPs were published in Oncology specialized journals.