know of a way to display citation counts for a PubMed search?

[CremasterFlash]

Hi all, I'm just starting to work on my thesis for med school. I have what I think is a good idea and want to read the high impact papers in my potential area of inquiry.

I thought that I might begin by reading the most-cited papers from a broad PubMed search on the topic (1157 articles returned), but as far as I can tell, there's no way to display the citation count for each article alongside its author, title, etc.

Any constructive suggestions most appreciated.

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[typhoonegator]

I don't know of a way to do this the way you are asking. However, many programs do have a site where you can look up the impact factor for each journal, which is a way of approximating how often articles in a particular journal are cited.

In general, where an article appears is the best way to surmise the degree of impact it has. An article in the New England Journal of Medicine is much more likely to be read (and cited) than an article in Molecular Medicine. Authors choose a journal to submit their manuscripts to based somewhat on the novelty and the importance of the research -- you don't always just "shoot for the moon" and submit to the best journal you can find, since this will result in delays to publication, and eventual resubmission to another more realistic journal. You can get a bad reputation among editors this way as well. Articles are reviewed by peers, and given a priority score in conjunction with the editors, which determines whether it gets accepted for publication. You can do good research that is technically without flaw, but still get a low priority score if the manuscript doesn't apply to the intended readers.

For 1157 articles, you are going to need to figure out how to narrow down your query, or look for a review article in the field that summarizes the recent major contributions. Also, talking to someone who works in this area on a daily basis can be invaluable, as they can point out relevant articles and help you figure out if your idea is a new contribution or not.

 

[blueskyline]

If you use firefox, you can use he i-cite add-on. It finds each article in your pubmed search result using google scholar and displays the "times cited" number next to it.

 

[CremasterFlash]

thanks folks, both comments very helpful.

 

[Charles_Carmichael]

I think Web of Knowledge might have citation counts for the articles on PubMed. I'm not completely sure though since I very rarely use WoK.