Academic influence of American College of Radiology Appropriateness Criteria: a citation analysis of thoracic and cardiac imaging guidelines

Purpose: To evaluate the academic impact of the American College of Radiology thoracic and cardiac Appropriateness Criteria (ACR-AC) guideline publications through citation analysis. Methods: The Scopus database was used to collect publication year, version number, and number and identity of citing publications for thoracic and cardiac imaging ACR-AC guideline publications. For each citing article, the journal name and impact factor, publication year, countries of all authors, and language(s) of publication were collected. An article h-index was computed for each ACR-AC guideline. Results: 31 thoracic and cardiac ACR-AC guideline publications received 758 citations from 379 journals, with authors representing 62 countries. The median citation count was 15 (range = 1–97) and the median article h-index was 5 (range = 1–19). The most frequent country of authorship of articles citing an ACR-AC guideline publication was the United States, but 66.7 % of authors were from other countries. The median impact factor for the citing journals was 3.0 (range = 0.0–521.6). A majority of the total citations were from “Non-Radiology Journals” (n = 422/758 [55.7 %]) which comprised a majority of all journals represented (n = 295/379 [77.8 %]). Conclusions: Citation characteristics of ACR-AC guideline publications suggest broad multidisciplinary and global academic influence.