Bibliometric analysis of top 100 most-cited clinical studies on ultrasound in the Emergency Department.

Study Objective: We identify and characterize the most highly cited articles related to ultrasonographic evaluations occurring in the emergency department.

Method: We retrieved the top 100 articles in terms of citations pertaining to ultrasonographic evaluations in the emergency department from the Scopus database. We determined the number of citations of each article, the number of citations per year, the number of Google Scholar citations, the ultrasonographical study fields, the number of patients evaluated in each study, and the specialties of the researchers conducting the studies and ultrasonographies. We then used the ANOVA test to compare the multivariate groups.

Results: The median citation number of the articles in the Scopus database was 115 (range: 75-681), and the number of citations per year was 7.5 (range: 3.8-40.1). Focused assessment with sonography in trauma and non-traumatic abdominal ultrasonography were conducted in 32 and 13 studies, respectively. The primary authors were emergency medicine specialists in 46 studies. We found that vascular and lung ultrasonography studies were characterized by the largest number of citations per year.

Conclusion: The most frequently cited studies conducted in the emergency department pertaining to the use of ultrasonography included a wide range of topics, and approximately half of the primary authors of these studies were emergency medicine specialists.