Factors Associated With the Highest and Lowest Cited Research Articles in Urology Journals

Objective: To determine what factors of published urology research articles are associated with future citations.

Methods: We identified all primary research articles published between 1997 and 2007 in Journal of Urology, British Journal of Urology International, Urology, and European Urology. Only 50 articles in this period had accrued 0 or 1 citation in a 10-year period following publication. We compared the characteristics of the articles in the low citation cohort to the 50 articles with the highest number of citations from the same journals and time period. Student's t tests, Wilcoxon rank-sum tests, chi-squared tests, and Fisher's exact tests were used to analyze the data with predetermined level of significance set to P < .05.

Results: There were many significant differences between the 2 cohorts. When compared to the cohort of articles with 0 or 1 citation, highly cited articles were significantly more likely to be a clinical study, multi-institutional and multinational effort, and related to the field of urologic oncology. They were also significantly more likely to have a larger sample size, a statistically significant primary finding, more authors, more references, and more tables, as well as longer title, abstract, and overall manuscript word counts.

Conclusion: Very few articles published in the major urology journals accrued 0 or 1 citation over a 10-year period. This suggests that the vast majority of articles selected for publication are used for further future research. Nevertheless, there were distinct differences between the 2 cohorts, showing that certain factors are associated with articles being cited more frequently.