Characteristics of highly cited articles in cerebral angiography.

Objective: To present and analyze the characteristics of the 100 most cited articles that used cerebral angiography for clinical evaluation and intervention.

Method: Two researchers independently extracted articles from multiple databases and ranked them by citation count to create the "top 100 most-cited" list.

Results: The top 100 articles received a total of 115,243 citations. Twenty-one of the top 100 articles were published between 2006 and 2010. Most studied disorder was ischemic stroke (n = 35), and cerebral angiography was used most frequently for diagnosis (n = 88).The United States was affiliated with the highest number of articles (n = 62), with Stroke publishing most articles (n = 22). Public sources funded 39 articles, private sources funded 35, and 38 articles reported conflicts of interest. Thirty-six studies were randomized controlled trials, and male authors held the majority of both first (n = 90) and senior (n = 88) authorship positions.

Conclusion: Within the scope of this study, the following features may define a typical highly cited article-a randomized controlled clinical trial conducted in the United States that studied ischemic stroke, used cerebral angiography for diagnosis, and was published relatively recently in a high-impact journal by male first and senior authors.