The 50 Most Cited Papers Pertaining to American Football: Analysis of Studies From the Past 40 Years

Abstract

Background: Bibliometric citation analyses have been widely used in medicine to help researchers gain foundational knowledge about a topic and identify subtopics of popular interest for further investigations. Purpose: To identify the 50 most cited research publications related to American football. Study Design: Cross-sectional study. Methods: The Clarivate Analytics Web of Science database was used to generate a list of publications relating to football. Articles were filtered by the total number of citations, and the top 50 most cited articles studying the sport of football were selected for this analysis. Articles were analyzed by author, publication year, country of origin, institution affiliation, journal, article type, main research topic area, competitive level, and the level of evidence. A total of 247 articles were reviewed to reach the top 50 articles. Results: The most studied topic within the top 50 articles was concussion/chronic traumatic encephalopathy (n = 40). Collegiate football was the most studied level of competition (n = 25). The journal publishing the greatest number of top articles was Neurosurgery. Two institutions, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Boston University School of Medicine, produced over one-third of top 50 articles (n = 18). Conclusion: Our analysis indicated that most of the top 50 publications related to the sport of football focused on concussion and CTE, were observational, and were published during or after 2000. The most studied level of competition was collegiate football.

The 50 Most Cited Papers on Rugby since 2000 Reveal a Focus Primarily on Strength and Conditioning in Elite Male Players

“…Yet, this focus on performance may be an attempt by researchers and stakeholders (including study sponsors such as Rugby Football Union and World Rugby) to determine performance advantages for future sporting competitions. Interestingly, this study's total number of citations is less than in other sports, such as ice hockey [ 18 ] and American football [ 17 ]. This may result from the relative popularity and international reach of rugby compared to these other sports, with rugby only recently being readded to the Olympic sporting lineup in 2016.…”

“…Contrarily, this may be another incident result of publishing bias, whereby previous, and potentially dated, research was cited by known researchers and thus subsequently cited in modern research in lieu of more updated and current studies. Indeed, most of the top 50 ice hockey and American football publications in the last two decades have focused on sport-related concussions [ 17 , 18 ]. Given that rugby has the highest rate of concussion [ 9 ], the lack of focus on concussion in the most cited rugby manuscripts in the last two decades is alarming.…”

“…Additionally, this study is limited by the use of a single database. Although this database has been commonly used in other bibliometric analyses [ 17 , 18 ], other databases such as PubMed or Scopus may have produced different results. Collectively, these methods may have affected the overall sample of manuscripts included which in turn could have affected the breakdown of topics of research, authors, author countries, and journals where the research was published in.…”

“…Consistent with previous research [ 17 , 18 ], citation density was calculated for each article as the number of total citations divided by the number of years since initial publication. Consistent with prior research [ 18 ] and for ease of organization, all data organization and summary statistics were computed using Microsoft Excel (Microsoft 365 MSO (Version 2304), Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA).…”

“…Consistent with prior research [ 18 ] and for ease of organization, all data organization and summary statistics were computed using Microsoft Excel (Microsoft 365 MSO (Version 2304), Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA). Moreover, similar to previous research [ 17 – 19 ], due to open access and publicly available nature of these data, institutional review board approval was not required and thus not obtained for this study. Network analysis descriptions are provided below using established methods [ 19 , 20 ].…”