Afshin Amini - Assistant Professor, Emergency Medicine Department, Emam Hossein Hospital, Shahid Beheshti University Of MedicalSciences, Tehran, Iran
Hojjat Derakhshanfar - Assistant Professor, Pediatric Emergency Medicine Department, Mofid Children Hospital, Shahid Beheshti University Of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran
Ali Arhami Dolatabadi - Assistant Professor, Pediatric Emergency Medicine Department, Mofid Children Hospital, Shahid Beheshti University Of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran
Hamid Kariman - Assistant Professor, Pediatric Emergency Medicine Department, Mofid Children Hospital, Shahid Beheshti University Of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran

Objective: Substance abuse has a significantimpact on global health and socioeconomiccondition in most countries. This study aimwas to identify and compare characteristicsof the highly cited publications with those ofuncited publications in the field of drugabuse and misuse.Methods: All of publications and citationsrelated to substance abuse in the year 2007and also the trend of publications related tosubstance abuse from 2000-2009 wasstudied, through the ISI web of science wererecorded. One percent of highly citedpublications with equal number of un-citedpublications were compared. The number ofauthors, journals, impact factor of thejournals, citation rates, number ofreferences, number of pages, document type,language, first author s affiliation, firstauthor s country, publisher, and subjectcategory, type of drug, first author s genderand study design and type were compared.Results: There was 60.4% increase in thenumber of publications from 2000 to 2009.Among highly cited publications, theaverage number of citation was 84.9(+40.0). 75.5% of highly cited publicationsdiscussed the mechanism of action orpathways that resulted in drug addictionwhile among uncited publications,epidemiological and population basedstudies were the approach of 92.8% of thearticles. Neuroscience and experimentalstudies were the main subject area and typeof study in highly cited articles.Conclusion: This study showed that studydesign, subject area and topic influencecitation rate. Also impact factor of thepublishing journals, language ofpublications and geographic distribution ofpublications, number of authors, type ofarticles and number of references couldinfluence the citation rate.

Substance abuse, highly cited, Uncited