Re response to: 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

We particularly thank Dr. Yan for keeping an eye on our recent article The 100 top-cited articles in orthodontics from 1975 to 2011.

Firstly, in the letter Dr. Yan questioned the representativeness of articles that we took for citation analysis of publications in orthodontics. On one hand, as we have clearly noted the limitations in paragraph 6 in the discussion, some significant orthodontic papers1,2 that appeared in comprehensive dental journals were excluded. On the other hand, we excluded orthodontic papers published in other related journals, for example, journals in sleep, orthopedics, pediatrics and so on. This problem originates from how we understand the interdisciplinary. Generally speaking, papers published in related journals are viewed and cited by persons in this discipline more than those in orthodontics and this may impair the representativeness of the articles. In spite of defects, the study provides insight into the achievement and development of orthodontics research over the past decades. Using professional journals to perform similar research has been widely adopted in multiple disciplines.3–9 We did not search material using “orthodon*” as the topic word and then include the articles with detailed criteria, because we identified the orthodontic articles by professional journals. And it was “detailed criteria” in our study.

Secondly, Dr. Yan brought up an article10 that would have been one of our omissions; however, it is the third one from the target list shown in our recent paper. (Table 1) We searched the data base on November 5, 2011, so the number of citation was different.

In summary, it is interesting to retrospect the studies in one subject. Facing so much information, there are multiple methods for obtaining the data and describing the result. We believe that further studies in fields of medical science will enhance bibliometric evaluation.