The top 100 cited articles on Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD): A citation analysis

There is an exponential growth in the field of biomedical literature over the years. Although numerous articles are published every year, few of them present important conceptual advances in that particular field and are found to be influential in the evolution of the field. The number of citations a publication receives can be used as a proxy marker of its impact on the field. Hence we aimed to analyze the top cited articles (n = 100) on obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) as of July 2018. Google scholar database was searched using a freely available software, Publish or Perish. Information related to number of citations, publication title, publication year, name of the journal, country of origin, author details, institution of origin, article type, and article design. The original research articles were further classified into descriptive/epidemiology, mechanism, management, scale/measurement, imaging and medical psychiatry. The citation classics suggest that clinical trials/management, epidemiology and neuroimaging were the most researched areas in the OCD research. These citation classics provide an important insight into the historical developments, like the role of serotonin and caudate in OCD. This approach of citation analysis provides an opportunity to retrieve the classic articles on OCD, and describes the trends in OCD research.