Setting: Citation analyses aid in assessing quality, trends and future directions of research fields.
Objective: To identify the most influential articles on infections caused by non-tuberculous mycobacteria (NTM) in the last 20 years.
Design: We performed a cited reference search of the Web of Science database from 1995 to 2015. The 100 most cited articles on NTM infections were analysed.
Results: The top 100 articles were cited 114-1471 times, and were published from 1995 to 2013. Sixty-five were laboratory-based, basic science articles, with the major topics being pathophysiology (n = 20) and molecular methods for NTM identification (n = 15). Among the 35 non-laboratory studies, major topics were clinical management (n = 15) and epidemiology (n = 14). The top article was a clinical treatise on the management of NTM disease, published in 2007. Although there was a correlation between article rank and journal impact factor (P = 0.043, ρ = -0.202), the five articles from the journals with highest impact factors did not rank among the top 10 articles.
Conclusion: A large proportion of influential articles on NTM infection are basic scientific studies, and the most influential articles are not always published in high-impact journals.