Characterizing the highly cited articles: a large-scale bibliometric analysis of the top 1% most cited research

TL;DR

This large-scale bibliometric analysis reveals that highly cited research articles differ significantly from less-cited ones across various bibliometric factors, including journal impact, length, and collaboration patterns, highlighting key characteristics of influential scientific work.

Contribution

The study provides a comprehensive comparison of highly cited versus non-highly cited articles across multiple scientific fields, identifying specific bibliometric features associated with high citation impact.

Findings

Highly cited articles are published in higher impact factor journals.

They have 25% more co-authors on average.

Highly cited articles are longer in pages and references.

Abstract

We conducted a large-scale analysis of around 10,000 scientific articles, from the period 2007-2016, to study the bibliometric or formal aspects influencing citations. A transversal analysis was conducted disaggregating the articles into more than one hundred scientific areas and two groups, one experimental and one control, each with a random sample of around five thousand documents. The experimental group comprised a random sample of the top 1% most cited articles in each field and year of publication (highly cited articles), and the control group a random sample of the remaining articles in the Journal Citation Reports (science and social science citation indexes in the Web of Science database). As the main result, highly cited articles differ from non-highly cited articles in most of the bibliometric aspects considered. There are significant differences, below the 0.01 level, between the groups of articles in many variables and areas. The highly cited articles are published in journals of higher impact factor (33 percentile points above) and have 25% higher co-authorship. The highly cited articles are also longer in terms of number of pages (10% higher) and bibliographical references (35% more). Finally, highly cited articles have slightly shorter titles (3% lower) but, contrastingly, longer abstracts (10% higher).