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.