Re: The 100 top-cited articles in orthodontics from 1975 to 2011 by Jifang Hui, Zongkai Han, Guannan Geng, Weijun Yan and Ping Shao. The Angle Orthodontist; on line early: http://dx.doi.org/10.2319/040512-284.1

To: Editor, The Angle Orthodontist

I read with great interest the article “The 100 top-cited articles in orthodontics from 1975 to 2011” in the “online early” section of The Angle Orthodontist. However, I feel that the study results may not be inclusive of all of the most cited papers in orthodontics. The articles included in the analysis were published in 3 orthodontic journals. Consequently, the authors neglected those orthodontic papers that appeared in comprehensive dental journals or other related journals. For instance, I found 2 articles published in other journals by searching in the “Web of Science” that were not included in their analysis. One1 was cited 279 times while the other2 was cited 258 times. These 2 papers could certainly be counted among the top 10 cited papers. Also, I found an article3 published in Am J Orthod, cited 328 times, that was not included in the results. These omissions could have been caused by lack of a predefined search strategy and inclusion criteria. I believe it would have been more appropriate to use, for example, “orthodon*” as the topic word to search in the Web of Science, then to rank the articles by the number of citations and include the articles with detailed criteria. It may have increased the amount of work required but would certainly have been more reliable.