A bibliometric search of citation classics in anesthesiology

A comprehensive list of the most-cited articles in anesthesia was compiled using a bibliometric database and general search terms such as "anesthesia" as well as subspecialty-specific search terms. Queries were reviewed for relevance to anesthesiology practice, categorized by subspecialty, and ranked according to their citation counts.The database resulted in 2519 articles published between 1945 and 2008. The specialty areas most represented were chronic pain medicine (11%), pharmacology (9%), and pain sciences (9%).This citations classic allows for advances in anesthesiology and its subspecialties to be highlighted as well to provide useful manuscripts to guide patient care, direct future research, and serve as sources for future academic pursuit.It is ironic that as electronic access to medical literature becomes more pervasive, the ability for an individual to maintain a semblance of broad awareness of that body of knowledge becomes more difficult. The diversity of diseases, the patients, and the basic sciences that encompass the specialty of anesthesiology and its related specialties is reflected by a similar heterogeneity of the journals in which anesthesiology knowledge is published. As this body of knowledge increases, it is important to enhance methodologies that identify especially relevant and important papers within the overall field, as well as within its multiple subspecialties. With the development of Internet-based search engines, numerous methods to search for relevant medical literature now exist. While these databases are easy to use, the results of basic keyword or topic searches are often overwhelming and shed little light on the most relevant articles. There is a need to improve a practioners' ability to quickly find important articles.Articles that have value to others are often cited in subsequent manuscripts. These referenced papers are catalogued in bibliometric resources that track the number of times a paper is cited. Because the vast majo