Anatomy of success: the top 100 cited scientific reports focused on hypertension research.

Abstract

• Online Data Supplement Hypertension affects ≈78 million adults (1 in 3 adults) in the United States and is a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease, stroke, and chronic kidney disease.1 Thus, hypertension represents a formidable challenge to US healthcare. In 2010, hypertension was projected to cost US $93.5 billion in healthcare services, medications, and missed days of work.2 In 2012, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the largest funding source for biomedical research in the world, spent $215 million to support hypertension research.3,4 In this study, we undertook an effort to identify the most frequently cited 100 articles that describe advances focused on hypertension research. The number of citations an article receives after its publication is a measure of its recognition and suggests the effect of its information within the scientific community. Therefore, a bibliometric analysis (ie, citation and content analysis) of the scientific literature may be used to identify influential articles, research topics, authors, and so on in a specific scientific field. To date, although several journals provide statistics of their own publications, we were unable to find an across-the-board bibliometric analysis of hypertension research. Here, we report the results of a bibliometric analysis that aimed to examine key characteristics of the top 100 cited articles that focused on hypertension published during the past century (T100), including citation ranking, year of publication, publishing journal, type of study, country of origin, funding source, and authorship. We used the Science Citation Index (SCI)–expanded (1900–2013) database provided by the Institute for Scientific Information Web of Science (http://thomsonreuters.com/web-of-science/) to determine the 100 most frequently cited articles in hypertension research. The search topic terms included were hypertension, hypertensive, or blood pressure. The articles identified by these search terms were accessed and reviewed online through the NIH library, and …