Top cited publications on fluoride in relation to oral health: A bibliometric analysis

The citation count is one of the indications of a manuscript’s impact. The objective of the current study was to identify and analyze the top cited articles published on fluoride in the context of oral health. The articles published from January 1997 to December 2017 on fluoride in the context of oral health were identified using the Scopus database. The 100 top cited articles were ranked based on the number of citations received. The manuscripts were also analyzed for the type of study, the name of the journal, the impact factor, the publication year, the author names, the institutional affiliation and the country of origin. The data analysis was performed using SPSS (version 20) statistical software (IBM, NY, USA). Among the top 100 most cited articles, the citation count ranged from 419 to 63. The two most prominent journals were Caries research (n=22) and Journal of Dental Research (n=16). The four year period with the greatest number of manuscripts published was 2001–2004 (n=37) and most of the papers originated from USA (n=25). The most frequent institutions were the University of Oslo, the University of California, San Francisco, the Justus Liebig University, and the Academic Centre for Dentistry Amsterdam (n=5 for each institution). The most frequent first author was Ganss C (n=7), and the most frequent coauthor was Klimek J (n=8). The majority of the studies were in vitro studies (n=40) and narrative reviews (n=23). This article reveals the progress of research on fluoride in oral health by identifying the topics, the institutions, and the authors contributing to fluoride research. There was a predominance of in vitro studies and narrative reviews among the highly cited manuscripts.