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The most downloaded and most cited articles in radiology journals: a comparative bibliometric analysis

  • Radiological Education
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Abstract

Objectives

To evaluate and compare the characteristics of the most downloaded and most cited articles in radiology journals.

Methods

We selected 41 radiology journals that provided lists of both the most downloaded and most cited articles on their websites, and identified the 596 most downloaded articles and 596 most cited articles. We compared the following characteristics of the most downloaded and most cited articles: year of publication, journal title, department of the first author, country of origin, publication type, radiologic subspecialty, radiologic technique and accessibility.

Results

Compared to the most cited articles, the most downloaded articles were more frequently review articles (36.1% vs 17.1%, p < 0.05), case reports (5.9% vs 3.2%, p < 0.05), guidelines/consensus statements (5.4% vs 2.7%, p < 0.05), editorials/commentaries (3.7% vs 0.7%, p < 0.05) and pictorial essays (2.0% vs 0.2%, p < 0.05). Compared to the most cited articles, the most downloaded articles more frequently originated from the UK (8.7% vs 5.0%, p < 0.05) and were more frequently free-access articles (46.0% vs 39.4%, p < 0.05).

Conclusion

Educational and free-access articles are more frequent among the most downloaded articles.

Key Points

• There was only small overlap between the most downloaded and most cited articles.

• Educational articles were more frequent among the most downloaded articles.

• Free-access articles are more frequent among the most downloaded articles.

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Funding

The authors state that this work has not received any funding.

Author information

Author notes

  1. Dae Young Yoon and Kyoung Ja Lim contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Radiology, Kangdong Seong-Sim Hospital, Hallym University College of Medicine, 150, Seongan-ro Gangdong-Gu, Seoul, 134-701, Korea

    Sora Baek, Dae Young Yoon, Kyoung Ja Lim, Young Kwon Cho, Young Lan Seo & Eun Joo Yun

Authors
  1. Sora Baek
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  2. Dae Young Yoon
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  3. Kyoung Ja Lim
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  4. Young Kwon Cho
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  5. Young Lan Seo
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  6. Eun Joo Yun
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Dae Young Yoon or Kyoung Ja Lim.

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Guarantor

The scientific guarantor of this publication is Dae Young Yoon.

Conflict of interest

The authors of this manuscript declare no relationships with any companies whose products or services may be related to the subject matter of the article.

Statistics and biometry

No complex statistical methods were necessary for this paper.

Informed consent

Written informed consent was waived by the institutional review board.

Ethical approval

Approval from the institutional animal care committee was not required because our study was a bibliometric analysis that used only publicly available data.

Methodology

• retrospective

• bibliometric analysis

• performed at one institution

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Baek, S., Yoon, D.Y., Lim, K.J. et al. The most downloaded and most cited articles in radiology journals: a comparative bibliometric analysis. Eur Radiol 28, 4832–4838 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00330-018-5423-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00330-018-5423-1

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