Is "Top 100 most cited" reliable to identify influential articles? Example of OTSR.

Bibliometric evaluations based on « top most cited » articles are commonly used to identify publications that have had a major impact in a specific field, as well as to highlight trends and advances. In Web of Science, nearly 900 publications contain the words «Top» and «Cited» in their title. However, this identification method tends to favor older articles because citation counts are cumulative. The use of normalized citation indicators is more relevant to identify high impact articles. Articles and reviews published in the journal OTSR between 2009 and 2024 were extracted and we compared three bibliometric indexes: total citation count, the Category Normalized Citation Impact (CNCI), and the global Top10% indicator. A total of 3404 publications from OTSR were analyzed. Sixteen publications were ranked within the global Top1%, and 280 within the global Top10%. Moderate agreement was observed between the different selection models (Ka = 0.54). These results are consistent with previous studies: the use of citation indicators normalized for publication year and disciplinary field provides a more reliable approach to identify influential publications within a given research area. IV; retrospective study.