Introduction

The number of citations that a published article receives is one form to visualize a discipline’s scientific production. These citations represent a form for universities to follow up on the articles published by their teaching staff within an institutional context.

Objective

To characterize the citations of the articles published by nursing teachers of a private university in the city of Medellin, Colombia.

Methods

This is a descriptive and exploratory study. Articles published by the nursing teachers were reviewed. The study variables included the characteristics of the published articles and the journals where the publications have been cited. Tracking of the citations was conducted on the Google Academic, Science Direct, and Scopus databases. The information was analyzed through univariate descriptive statistics.

Results

52 articles were reviewed. From these, 29 have been cited at least once. A total of 188 citations were recorded. Of these, 31 % are concentrated in 3 articles. The most cited articles were those with topics related to addictions, with 21 % of the total citations. The most cited article had 28 citations. Of the total citations, 41.5 % come from gray literature.

Discussion

The findings related to the bibliographical citations have relevance from various perspectives. The social and academic perspectives allow a different dimension of knowledge to overcome the plain vision of citation counting.

Conclusions

The level of citations given to the publications of the studied nursing teachers is low. It is important to continue carrying out studies related to publication production tracking.