Methods
A search was performed on the Thomson Reuters Web of Science citation
indexing database using the following terms ’aortic valve replacement’,
’replacement’, ’aortic valve’ and/or ’AVR’. The search was limited to
full manuscripts in English Language and includes publications from 1970
to 2019. The returned list was sorted by the total number of citations.
This method was initially developed by Paladugu et al. and
replicated by O’Sullivan, Kavanagh and Chan in various surgical
specialities. [2–5] The top 100 articles obtained were further
reviewed and analysed according to journal, authorship, institution,
country, year of publication, article type and topic. The generated
total citation count was inclusive of articles indexed by Web of Science
Core Collection, BIOSIS Citation Index, Chinese Science Citation
Database, Russian Science Citation Index and SciELO Citation Index.