The Top-Cited Articles in Osteopathic Medical Education: a Bibliometric Analysis

Objectives: This study identifies the 50 top-cited articles pertaining to osteopathic medical education from the Web of Science database and from seven prominent journals not indexed in this database. Guided by previous bibliometric research, we systematically examined the scientific literature about osteopathic medical education and captured their bibliometrics. The end goal was to learn about recurrent topics and authors associated with Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine.

Methods: Three search strategies were used to extract articles for this project: (1) Combined search terms for “osteopathic medicine” and “medical education”; (2) Combined search #1 with a search of authors from osteopathic medical schools; and (3) 7 journals which are known to publish osteopathic articles and are not indexed in the Web of Science database, were searched with the combined terms for search #1. Bibliometrics for the top articles were gathered through Google Scholar. Inclusion and exclusion criteria for all articles were identified and applied to the final results.

Results: After examining over 191,250 articles, 50 articles were identified that met the search criteria and were listed according to the number of times cited metric. Common themes identify what specific osteopathic topics are published, and where there is a gap in the literature on osteopathic medical education. The top educational main topics were medical education and anatomy education. One third of the articles discussed medical topics, such as anatomy, empathy, interprofessional education, osteopathic, surgery and technology.

Conclusions: Bibliometric analysis provides a way to analyze the landscape of scholarly research and authorship in scientific publishing and this study concludes that osteopathic medical education is a vibrant topic in scientific literature.