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Original Article • J. bras. psiquiatr. 70 (4) • 2021 • https://doi.org/10.1590/0047-2085000000350   copy

The Jornal Brasileiro de Psiquiatria: A Bibliometric Survey of the one hundred most cited articles in the last 15 years

Jornal Brasileiro de Psiquiatria: Uma Pesquisa Bibliométrica sobre os 100 artigos mais citados nos últimos 15 anos

Authorship SCIMAGO INSTITUTIONS RANKINGS

ABSTRACT

Objective:

Bibliometrics is a group of statistical and mathematical methods employed to measure and analyze the quantity and the quality of scientific articles, books, and other forms of publications. The objective of the present study was to conduct a bibliometric analysis of the Jornal Brasileiro de Psiquiatria (JBP) by listing its 100 most highly cited articles in the scientific literature and identifying their main characteristics in terms of authorship and research topics and design.

Methods:

The 100 top-cited references in the JBP were identified through a search with Google Scholar. The main author, last author, corresponding author, the total number of authors, gender of the authors, year of publication, research institution, geographic origin, language, and the research design and subject of each reference were recorded and analyzed.

Results:

A marked increase in the number of citations in the last 15 years, a relatively balanced distribution of publications among the Brazilian states and research centers, absence of gender bias among authors, and a varied range of published topics suggest a good current editorial performance by the JBP. Relative lack of systematic reviews and longitudinal studies, dearth of articles published in the English language, and modest participation of foreign authors were points requiring improvement.

Conclusion:

The present study suggests that a survey of the 100 most cited articles in the JBP can provide a historical overview of the progress of this journal, as well as highlight the main obstacles, constraints, and challenges faced by its editors and authors.

KEYWORDS
Bibliometrics; bibliometric analysis; bibliographic databases; periodicals as topic; gender bias; publication bias

RESUMO

Objetivo:

Bibliometria é um grupo de métodos estatísticos e matemáticos empregados para medir e analisar a quantidade e a qualidade de artigos científicos, livros e outras formas de publicações. O objetivo do presente estudo foi realizar uma análise bibliométrica do Jornal Brasileiro de Psiquiatria (JBP), relacionando seus 100 artigos mais citados na literatura científica e identificando suas principais características em termos de autoria e questões de pesquisa e delineamento experimental.

Métodos:

As 100 referências mais citadas no JBP foram identificadas por meio de uma busca no Google Scholar. Foram registradas e analisadas as seguintes informações: autor principal, último autor, autor correspondente, número total de autores, gênero dos autores, ano de publicação, instituição de pesquisa, origem geográfica e idioma de cada referência e seu tema de investigação e delineamento metodológico.

Resultados:

O aumento acentuado no número de citações nos últimos 15 anos, a boa distribuição das publicações entre os estados e centros de pesquisa brasileiros, a ausência de viés de gênero entre os autores e a variada gama de tópicos publicados sugerem um bom desempenho editorial atual do JBP. A relativa falta de revisões sistemáticas e estudos longitudinais, os poucos artigos publicados em inglês e a pequena participação de autores estrangeiros são pontos que requerem melhorias.

Conclusão:

O presente estudo sugere que o levantamento dos 100 artigos mais citados no JBP pode fornecer um panorama histórico da evolução dessa revista, bem como destacar os principais obstáculos, restrições e desafios enfrentados por seus editores e autores.

PALAVRAS-CHAVE
Bibliometria; análise bibliométrica; bases de dados bibliográficas; periódicos como assunto; viés de gênero; viés de publicação

INTRODUCTION

Bibliometrics is a group of statistical and mathematical methods employed to measure and analyze the quantity and the quality of scientific articles, books, and other forms of publications11 Pritchard A. Statistical bibliography or bibliometrics. J Doc. 1969;25(4):348-9.. In the scientific field, it is customarily considered that the number of times a published article is cited reflects how important that study is within its discipline22 Cheek J, Garnham B, Quan J. What’s in a number? Issues in providing evidence of impact and quality of research(ers). Qual Health Res. 2006;16(3):423-35.–44 Catharina R, UlfKronman K. Bibliometric handbook for Karolinska Institutet. Karolinska Institutet University Library publications. 2006;11.. Evaluating the most cited articles is one of the key strategies currently used to monitor influential scientific research. Identifying the most highly cited articles and determining the characteristics that make them citable can provide the scientific community with valuable information55 Aksnes DW, Sivertsen G. The effect of highly cited papers on national citation indicators. Scientometrics. 2021;59(2):213-24..

Bibliometric analysis has many relevant implications, such as identifying which research areas are most influential, helping the researchers understand what makes a scientific contribution significant for their area, finding the authors who have most contributed to the field, and highlighting regional differences, among others. This data set can ultimately provide an overview of the trends and directions that a given area has been following in the recent past and is likely to follow in the future66 Lipsman N, Lozano AM. The most cited works in major depression: the ‘Citation classics’. J Affect Disord. 2011;134(1-3):39-44.–1010 Parmar A, Ganesh R, Mishra AK. The top 100 cited articles on Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD): A citation analysis. Asian J Psychiatry. 2019;42:34-41.. Recently, several studies have attempted to identify the most relevant or influential articles in areas as diverse as terrorism1111 Silke A, Schmidt-Petersen J. The golden age? What the 100 most cited articles in terrorism studies tell us. Terrorism and Political Violence. 2017;29(4):692-712., neuroscience1212 Yeung AW, Goto TK, Leung WK. At the leading front of neuroscience: a bibliometric study of the 100 most-cited articles. Front Hum Neurosci. 2017;11:363., transplantation1313 O’Sullivan K, Hurley JP. The 100 most cited publications in transplantation. Ann Transplant. 2014;19:436-43., astronomy1414 Frogel JA. Astronomy’s greatest hits: The 100 most cited papers in each year of the first decade of the 21st century (2000-2009). Publ Astron Soc Pac. 2010;122(896):1214., and vaccines1515 Zhang Y, Quan L, Xiao B, Du L. The 100 top-cited studies on vaccine: a bibliometric analysis. Hum Vaccin Immunother. 2019;15(12):3024-31. by listing the 100 top-cited articles on each specific topic and conducting a bibliometric analysis.

The Jornal Brasileiro de Psiquiatria (JBP) is one of the most traditional psychiatric journals in Brazil, being published uninterruptedly since 1938 by the Institute of Psychiatry (IPUB) of the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). The JBP is indexed in the Scopus, Google Scholar, SciELO, PsychINFO, and other scientific journals search and indexing databases. However, it is still not indexed in the two most important citation databases, ISI of Web Science and PubMed. This fact limits its scientific influence, which is not commensurate with its historical role.

The main objective of the present study was to conduct a bibliometric analysis of the Jornal Brasileiro de Psiquiatria by listing its 100 most highly cited articles in the scientific literature and identifying their main characteristics in terms of authorship and research issues and design. It is expected that these observations will highlight the main strengths and weaknesses of the scientific literature published in the JBP and will guide editors and authors in their search for excellence.

METHODS

The 100 most cited psychiatric articles published in the Jornal Brasileiro de Psiquiatria were identified on January 6th, 2021, using the Google Scholar. Other searching tools, such as Scopus or ISI Web of Science, tend to underestimate the impact of the authors’ academic citation by counting only the citations in the scientific journals indexed in their base. We opted instead for using Google Scholar, a free online reference indexing system made available by Google, which has a much larger scope of indexing academic sources1616 Meho LI, Yang K. A New Era in Citation and Bibliometric Analyses: Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar. J Am Soc Inf Sci Technol. 2006;58(13):2105-25.. Google Scholar now represents a major competitor for other databases in the field of bibliometrics and citation analysis since it provides extensive coverage of books, theses, dissertations, preprints, technical and periodical reports1717 Yang K, Meho LI. Citation analysis: a comparison of Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science. Proc Am Soc Inf Sci Technol. 2006;43(1):1-15.,1818 Jacsó P. Dubious hit counts and cuckoo’s eggs. Online Inf Rev. 2006;30(2):188-93.. Google Scholar displays search matches in approximately descending order of citation counts, but some inconsistencies in that ordering impose the need of checking and manually ordering the data to organize the collected information1717 Yang K, Meho LI. Citation analysis: a comparison of Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science. Proc Am Soc Inf Sci Technol. 2006;43(1):1-15.. Therefore, to ensure the correct identification of the 100 most cited articles, we checked the citation count of the 243 most cited references in 100 sequential pages shown by Google Scholar using the query “Jornal Brasileiro de Psiquiatria.”

The 100 top-cited references were classified by the decreasing number of citations and rest was discarded. The main author, last author, corresponding author, the total number of authors, gender of the authors, year of publication, research institution, geographic origin, language, the research design and the subject of each of the hundred top-cited references were recorded. The place of origin and institution were defined based on the address of the first author. The articles were divided into two categories, “review articles,” which could be systematic and non-systematic, and “original studies,” which were classified as cross-sectional clinical studies, validation studies (psychometry), randomized clinical trials, longitudinal studies, case reports, and opinion pieces. Finally, we looked at the mental disorders, pathological behaviors, and impaired functional status that were investigated, which we classified as follows: schizophrenia, mood disorders, suicide, anxiety, professional burnout, social phobia, sleep and sleep disorders, feeding and eating disorders, body image, drug dependence, impulse control disorders, internet addiction disorder, cognitive changes, dementia, and quality of life.

RESULTS

The number of citations for the 100 most highly cited articles in the JBP on January 6th, 2021, according to Google Scholar, ranged from 45 to 241 (Table 1).

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Table 1
Citation ranking of the 100 most-cited articles published by the Jornal Brasileiro de Psiquiatria according to the Google Scholar

The 23 most-cited articles were cited, each one more than a hundred times, and the four most-cited articles were cited each one more than 200 times. The years of publication of the 100 most cited articles ranged from 1983 to 2017. In 10 years only – from 2005 to 2015 – we found the largest proportion of top-cited publications: 80 articles among the 100 most cited ones (Figure 1). The average number of citations per article in the list was 83.84.

Figure 1
Year of publication of the 100 most cited articles in the JBP.

São Paulo and Minas Gerais were the states with the largest number of articles in this list, 28 and 20 respectively, followed by the Rio Grande do Sul and Espírito Santo with eight. Still, in general, the articles were well distributed by the states. Three articles had the first author’s addresses in foreign cities, namely Montreal, Havana, and London (Table 2).

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Table 2
States ranked according to the number of top-cited studies published in the Jornal Brasileiro de Psiquiatria

The distribution of research centers follows, as expected, the distribution by states, with São Paulo research institutions in prominent positions, particularly the Universidade Federal de São Paulo (Unifesp) and the Universidade de São Paulo (USP). There were no highly-cited articles originating from research institutions in the northern region of Brazil (Figure 2).

Figure 2
Number of articles per research center.

The number of authors per article ranged from one to 13, with an average of 3.65. Six articles had a single author. The proportion of female authors exceeded that of male ones, for both the categories of the first authors and the total number of authors (Figure 3).

Figure 3
Distribution of authors of top cited articles in the Jornal Brasileiro de Psiquiatria by sex.

We divided the articles into two large groups, review articles, and original articles. Despite the large number of original studies, these were entirely cross-sectional, with no cohort study found. There were 14 review articles: three systematic reviews (Table 1: articles 4, 39 and 43) and eleven non-systematic reviews (Table 1: articles 19-21, 28, 44, 48, 66, 83, 89, 94 and 100). Portuguese was the language of publication for most studies. Only eight articles were published in English (Table 1: articles 18, 35, 41, 45, 47, 50, 69 and 90).

Among the various mental disorders, pathological behaviors and impaired functional status investigated in the articles, alcohol and drug dependence; feeding and eating disorders and body image disturbances; mental health issues; quality of life; and major depression were, in that order, those with the largest proportion of studies among the 100 most cited articles in the JBP (Figure 4).

Figure 4
The five mental or behavioral disorders with more studies published among the 100 top cited articles in the JBP.

Regarding the studied population, adults of both genders, elderly of both genders, university students of both genders, adolescents of both genders, and epidemiological samples were the five most often studied populations (Figure 5).

Figure 5
The five more studied populations in the 100 top cited articles in the JBP.

DISCUSSION

This study aimed to identify the 100 articles most cited in the Jornal Brasileiro de Psiquiatria and highlight the characteristics that made them citable. Although the importance of citation analysis has been hotly debated, we assumed that there is currently no better marker to take as a reference in the bibliometric evaluation.

It was expected that the older articles in the JBP would be more highly cited than the newer ones by the mere fact that, since more time has elapsed since their publication, there would be more possibilities for them to be cited. Nevertheless, we found that 80% of the top-cited articles were published between 2005 and 2015. The lack of highly cited articles after 2016 is understandable due to the short time elapsed since their publication. Citations tend to be scarce during the first years after publication and become more common only three to ten years later1919 Pepe A, Kurtz MJ. A measure of total research impact independent of time and discipline. PLoS One. 2012;7(11):e46428.. We suggest that the peak in highly cited articles in the period 2005-2015 should then be ascribed to an editorial improvement that the JBP has been experiencing in recent years, with a more rigorous selection of manuscripts and a higher quality of the published articles, which led to an increased number of citations.

Our results indicate that the JBP has been fulfilling its role of being a journal accessible to researchers from different institutions and regions of Brazil, with several states represented among the 100 most cited articles, and within the larger states, several of its research institutions. Although the JBP is published by a research institute of the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), this university occupies only the number five ranking position in the list of top published articles in the JBP. This finding suggests that there were no biases toward the manuscripts that originated from the UFRJ and highlights the degree of editorial independence of the JBP editors. On the other side, the list of top-cited articles in the JBP included only three studies from countries other than Brazil. Additionally, only eight articles were published in the English language, limiting the JBP’s potential readership. To foster its impact and representativeness, the JBP needs to increase its international projection, and publishing more articles in the English language would be an essential step.

At the regional level, the total absence of articles from the northern region of Brazil among the most cited ones in the JBP is a worrying trend and a significant source of concern. Strategic investment should be made to stimulate research efforts in the states and regions of Brazil with less scientific resources and tradition.

Gender inequality has been observed across medical specialties2020 Carr PL, Raj A, Kaplan SE, Terrin N, Breeze JL, Freund KM. Gender differences in academic medicine: retention, rank, and leadership comparisons from the National Faculty Survey. Acad Med. 2018;93(11):1694.. Citation-based metrics are systematically used to evaluate the relative scientific merits of a researcher. The probing of gender inequalities in citation impact is currently one of the most critical aspects of the modern bibliometric analysis2121 Andersen JP, Schneider JW, Jagsi R, Nielsen MW. Meta-Research: Gender variations in citation distributions in medicine are very small and due to self-citation and journal prestige. Elife. 2019;8:e45374.. The facts that the proportions of female authors exceeded that of male ones for both the first authors and the total number of authors’ categories in the list of top-cited articles indicate no gender bias in the JBP publications.

Most articles featured in the top-cited list were original studies (86%). However, they all had a cross-sectional research design. Among the reviews, only three were systematic ones. These two limitations may have contributed to reducing the number of citations per paper. More rigorous screening of the study designs is likely to reverse this untoward trend.

We wondered why topics such as alcohol and drug dependence; feeding and eating disorders and body image disturbances; mental health issues; quality of life; and major depression featured prominently in the list of the top-cited articles in the JBP. We hypothesize that these studies reported the prevalence and characteristics of these disorders in specific populations in Brazil. This type of data may not be particularly enticing for international journals’ editors but is potentially highly relevant for Brazilian researchers and health planners.

The present study has several limitations. The main one is that it was based on a Google Scholar search only. However, since the JBP is still no indexed in the ISI Web of Science or the PubMed, there were no other high-level alternatives to complement it. We acknowledge that our findings reflect a reality that can change extremely fast. We, therefore, suggest that comparable studies be conducted every few years to detect and monitor emerging trends. Finally, citation analysis is one among several academic performance metrics and must be corroborated by other methods of analysis.

CONCLUSIONS

The present study suggests that a survey of the 100 most cited articles in the Jornal Brasileiro de Psiquiatria can provide a historical overview of the progress of this psychiatric journal and highlight the main obstacles, constraints, and challenges faced by its editors.

A marked increase in the number of citations in the last 15 years, a good distribution of publications among the Brazilian states and research centers, and various published topics are extremely positive findings. There is, however, much room for improvement, particularly in the study designs, use of the English language, and participation of foreign authors.

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    Yeung AW, Goto TK, Leung WK. At the leading front of neuroscience: a bibliometric study of the 100 most-cited articles. Front Hum Neurosci. 2017;11:363.
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    O’Sullivan K, Hurley JP. The 100 most cited publications in transplantation. Ann Transplant. 2014;19:436-43.
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    Frogel JA. Astronomy’s greatest hits: The 100 most cited papers in each year of the first decade of the 21st century (2000-2009). Publ Astron Soc Pac. 2010;122(896):1214.
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    Zhang Y, Quan L, Xiao B, Du L. The 100 top-cited studies on vaccine: a bibliometric analysis. Hum Vaccin Immunother. 2019;15(12):3024-31.
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    Meho LI, Yang K. A New Era in Citation and Bibliometric Analyses: Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar. J Am Soc Inf Sci Technol. 2006;58(13):2105-25.
  • 17
    Yang K, Meho LI. Citation analysis: a comparison of Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science. Proc Am Soc Inf Sci Technol. 2006;43(1):1-15.
  • 18
    Jacsó P. Dubious hit counts and cuckoo’s eggs. Online Inf Rev. 2006;30(2):188-93.
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    Pepe A, Kurtz MJ. A measure of total research impact independent of time and discipline. PLoS One. 2012;7(11):e46428.
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    Carr PL, Raj A, Kaplan SE, Terrin N, Breeze JL, Freund KM. Gender differences in academic medicine: retention, rank, and leadership comparisons from the National Faculty Survey. Acad Med. 2018;93(11):1694.
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    Andersen JP, Schneider JW, Jagsi R, Nielsen MW. Meta-Research: Gender variations in citation distributions in medicine are very small and due to self-citation and journal prestige. Elife. 2019;8:e45374.

Publication Dates

  • Publication in this collection
    29 Nov 2021
  • Date of issue
    2021

History

  • Received
    21 July 2021
  • Accepted
    02 Sept 2021
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