The 100 most-cited articles in orthodontic journals in the last 20 years.

Introduction: This study aimed to identify and analyze the 100 most-cited articles published in orthodontic scientific journals in the past 21 years.

Methods: The research was conducted in the Thomson Reuters Web of Science data citation index, considering articles from 2000 to 2020 and the category of dentistry, oral surgery, and medicine. Information about the number of citations, citations per year, title, authors, year of publication, the title of scientific journals, type of study, keywords, and thematic field were extracted for each article. Descriptive statistical analyses were performed to evaluate the collected data. The Pearson correlation analysis was used to explore the relationship between publication and the number of citations received. The VOSviewer software (Leiden University Center for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden, the Netherlands) was used to generate the keyword cooccurrence network.

Results: The number of citations of the 100 selected articles ranged from 122 to 547. The journal with the largest number of cited articles was the American Journal of Orthodontics and Dentofacial Orthopedics. Most of the papers were cross-sectional and longitudinal studies, and the most frequent thematic fields among the selected articles were anchorage, root resorption, and rapid maxillary expansion. Orthodontic treatment, anchorage, and root resorption were the most frequent keywords.

Conclusions: Bibliometric analysis of citations revealed a greater centralization of orthodontic studies. Most of the articles were published in a single journal and by one country. Anchorage is a trending topic in orthodontics, and cross-sectional and longitudinal studies are the most-cited types of papers.