Bibliometric analysis of the top 100 most cited articles on multimorbidity using the Dimensions database

Background
Publications on multimorbidity have been significantly increasing in the last few years, as the interest and importance of MM become an emerging priority.

Objectives
To identify the 100 most-cited articles on multimorbidity in the new scholarly search database Dimensions and to analyse their features.

Material and methods
An online search was performed using the keywords “multimorbidity” and “multi-morbidity”, combined with the Boolean operator “OR”, from inception until 3 July 2019. The results were organised by order of number of citations, and the 100 most cited articles were selected after a critical reading of the abstract. Some data was collected from each included article: journal of publication, quartile and impact factor, year of publication, first author’s name, country of origin, number of total and recent citations, Altmetric Attention Score and more.

Results
The number of citations ranged from 2,056 to 74. The 100 most-cited articles were published between 1996 and 2016, and more than half were published after 2010. They were classified as original research (n = 65), reviews (n = 24), perspective/opinion//commentary (n = 10) and position statement (n = 1). All articles were written in English and published in 48 journals – 10 of those represented 53% of the articles published, and 61.1% the total of citations. 93 articles were published in first quartile journals. 70 articles were published in Open Access format.

Conclusions
The total number of citations was 19,777. Identification of articles with the most academic reach and influence will assist in generating evidence-based descriptions, comparisons and visualisation of research output on multimorbidity.