Background: This study aimed to identify and analyze the most influential Mouth Breathing (MB) articles in children and adolescents with the highest relative citation rates (RCRs), through bibliometric and altmetric analysis, from 2002 to 2021.
Material and methods: On March 27, 2023 a PubMed search was conducted to detect papers published about MB. From a total of 826 documents, the article data were downloaded from iCite database. The 100 articles with the highest RCRs were selected for analysis in terms of RCR, citations, altmetric attention score, year, journal, first author (name, institution, country), subfield and design of study. The key words were analyzed using Vosviewer.
Results: Among the 100 articles, there were no differences between the two periods analyzed for RCR and AAS values, yet 2002-11 was more cited than 2012-2021. There was no correlation between RCR and AAS; but there was with citations. Brazil was the most cited country (n=30). The articles were published in 48 journals pertaining to 8 categories, 44 corresponding to Dentistry. The most frequent study design was the cross-sectional (n=48). Although all subfields were well represented, the most frequent ones were "treatment", "sleep disorders" and "clinical characteristics/cephalometry". The most prominent keywords were "malocclusion" and "cephalometry".
Conclusions: Using RCR, a time- and field-normalized metric, one can identify influential articles in MB, a multidisciplinary research field of great importance for orthodontics. Because this bibliometric approach reduces the time from publication to the detection of an article´s importance for readers, it could be a valid alternative to using citation counts.