Richard Van Noorden published Nature's analysis of the 100 "most-cited research papers of all time." I'm not a fan of using citation as a proxy for importance, but I was still curious when I read this in his accompanying analysis of the most cited publications in the 21st century: "The articles garnering the most citations report developments in artificial intelligence (AI); approaches to improve the quality of research or systematic reviews; cancer statistics; and research software."
What were the ones related to improving the quality of systematic reviews? Here are 5 in the list from all-time that I think fit this bill:
Number 20: David Moher, Alessandro Liberati, Jennifer Tetzlaff, Douglas G Altman for the PRISMA Group. Preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses: the PRISMA statement (2009). (Published in several journals.)
Number 46: Matthew J Page et al. The PRISMA 2020 statement: an updated guideline for reporting systematic reviews (2021).
Number 50: Julian P T Higgins, Simon G Thompson, Jonathan J Deeks, Douglas G Altman. Measuring inconsistency in meta-analyses (2003).
Number 56: Matthias Egger, George Davey Smith, Martin Schneider, Christoph Minder. Bias in meta-analysis detected by a simple, graphical test (1997).
Number 105: Rebecca DerSimonian, Nan Laird. Meta-analysis in clinical trials (1986).
Source: Supplementary information for the analysis, top 100 from median ranking across 3 databases (Web of Science, Dimensions, and OpenAlex). There were 107 on this list.
Hilda Bastian
16 April 2025
Corrected soon after publication to specify the quote the source of the quote, in response to Richard's comment below.
Thanks Hilda! I’m not saying it’s a proxy for importance either.
ReplyDeleteJust to clarify, the high ranking of papers on systematic reviews refers to our analysis of the most-cited 21st-century papers, which is the article from which you took that quote. Those systematic-review studies are also heavily referenced by today’s research papers, as we mention in another article.
I didn’t say that the systematic review papers are prominent in the all-time top 100 cited works, though yes as you note, they make that list lower down.
Thanks, Richard! Fixed that.
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