Top cited authors in dermatology: a citation study from 24 journals: 1982-1996.

BACKGROUND: One measure of the impact of a medical article is how often it is cited in other articles. Many authors of articles published in dermatologic journals are seldom, if ever, cited while other authors are often cited.

OBJECTIVE: To identify the 25 authors whose publications in the dermatology literature were most often cited.

DESIGN: We obtained a citation database from the Institute for Scientific Information. From this database we separately quantified the total number of citations for each author and the total number of citations to first authors of original articles.

SETTING: Dermatology journals.

SUBJECTS: All authors of papers published in 24 dermatology journals between 1981 and 1996.

INTERVENTION: None.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE: Number of citations.

RESULTS: If all articles irrespective of the author's listing (eg, first or second) are counted, the top 25 cited authors in the dermatology literature from 1981 to 1996 were cited between 1480 and 4706 times. If only citations and articles of which an author was the first listed author are counted, the top 25 authors were cited between 400 and 813 times. Only 4 authors were among the top 25 cited authors by both criteria.

CONCLUSIONS: A relatively small proportion of all authors account for a high proportion of all citations of the dermatologic literature. The most frequently cited first authors of original articles were different in 84% of cases from the most often cited authors of all papers irrespective of the individuals placement in the authorship listing.