Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) research ranges from molecular microbiology to global health policy. For mechanisms, read Blair et al. (2015) and its 2023 successor by Darby et al. For origins, Davies and Davies (2010). For the scale of the problem, Murray et al. (2022) estimated the deaths associated with and attributable to bacterial AMR in 2019. For policy, Laxminarayan et al. (2013).
How the literature is organised
The literature divides by scale. At the molecular level, the questions are how resistance arises and spreads. Davies and Davies (2010) trace the origins and evolution of resistance since antibiotics were introduced. Blair et al. (2015) review mechanisms: preventing the drug from reaching its target, changing or protecting the target, and modifying or inactivating the drug. Stewart and Costerton (2001) and Høiby et al. (2010) explain the tolerance of biofilms. Kumarasamy et al. (2010) reported the emergence of the NDM-1 resistance mechanism in India, Pakistan and the UK.
At the population level, Laxminarayan et al. (2013), in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, set out the need for global solutions, and Prestinaci, Pezzotti and Pantosti (2015) describe AMR as a multifaceted global phenomenon.
Between the two sits genomic surveillance, which depends on curated databases of resistance genes. Those resource papers are heavily cited because they are methods.
Main debates
How big is the burden, and how should it be counted? Murray et al. (2022) present what they describe as the most comprehensive estimates to date and distinguish deaths associated with resistant infection from deaths attributable to resistance. The two figures rest on different counterfactuals, and the estimates are modelled for every location, including those with no data, so read the methods before quoting them. A second question is where resistance comes from: Davies and Davies (2010) attribute it to antibiotic use in clinical, agricultural and other settings and call for more work on environmental microbiomes, which Larsson and Flach (2022) review.
Where recent work is heading
Recent highly cited work includes the updated burden estimates with forecasts (Naghavi et al., 2024), environmental reservoirs (Larsson and Flach, 2022), an update on molecular mechanisms (Darby et al., 2023) and overviews of the most critical pathogens (Mancuso et al., 2021).
Most-cited foundational papers
Published before 2021 and ranked by how often later work cites them. Read the abstract of each and the full text of the three or four closest to your question. Citation count measures attention, not quality, so treat this as a map of what the field has argued about rather than a ranking of what is true.
Baofeng Jia and 22 others (2017). Nucleic Acids Research.
Cited by 2,865Open accessdoi:10.1093/nar/gkw1004
Most-cited papers since 2021
Primary studies and conceptual papers from 2021 onwards. A paper published in 2024 has had a few years to accumulate citations where the works in the section above have had decades, so compare these counts with each other rather than with the ones above.
David Chinemerem Nwobodo and 6 others (2022). Journal of Clinical Laboratory Analysis.
Cited by 991Open accessdoi:10.1002/jcla.24655
Recent reviews and meta-analyses
The fastest way into a literature. A good review gives you the structure of the field, a reference list to mine and, in its limitations section, the gaps other researchers have already spotted.
Satish Sharma and 5 others (2023). Microorganisms.
Cited by 989Open accessdoi:10.3390/microorganisms11061614
How big the literature is, and where it is published
OpenAlex indexes 74,223 works whose title matches this topic. The chart shows how many were published each year from 2000 to 2025; the current year is left out because it is incomplete.
Show the numbers as a table
Year
Works
2000
520
2001
528
2002
540
2003
583
2004
676
2005
757
2006
812
2007
1,015
2008
976
2009
1,188
2010
1,174
2011
1,444
2012
1,500
2013
1,727
2014
1,922
2015
2,016
2016
2,510
2017
2,854
2018
3,150
2019
3,630
2020
4,274
2021
4,479
2022
4,838
2023
5,208
2024
6,052
2025
8,030
Journals behind the most-cited work
Counted across the 192 most-cited works on the topic, not across everything published. Browsing recent issues of the first two or three is a reliable way to find current work that has not yet been cited much.
Frontiers in Microbiology9 papers
Nature Reviews Microbiology8 papers
Clinical Infectious Diseases7 papers
Clinical Microbiology Reviews6 papers
Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy6 papers
The Lancet Infectious Diseases6 papers
FEMS Microbiology Reviews5 papers
Science5 papers
Search strings to copy
Written for databases that accept Boolean operators (Scopus, Web of Science, ERIC, PubMed, EBSCO). Quotation marks keep a phrase together, an asterisk stands in for the end of a word, and OR groups go in brackets. British and American spellings are written out with OR rather than covered by a single-character wildcard, because those wildcards differ between databases: PubMed’s help page documents the asterisk only, and asks for at least four characters before it. Limit the search to title and abstract first; widen it only if you get too little. Our guide to starting a literature review covers how to record what you searched.
Burden and epidemiology
("antimicrobial resistance" OR "antibiotic resistance" OR "drug-resistant infection*") AND (burden OR mortality OR prevalence OR surveillance)
Antimicrobial stewardship
("antimicrobial stewardship" OR "antibiotic stewardship") AND (hospital* OR "primary care" OR nurs*) AND (intervention* OR outcome*)
One Health and the environment
("antimicrobial resistance" OR "antibiotic resistance" OR "resistance gene*") AND ("One Health" OR environment* OR wastewater OR livestock OR agriculture)
Explore antimicrobial resistance in Wonders →Opens Wonders on this question. Once you are signed in it becomes a project with suggested sub-topics and keywords you can edit before searching. The trial is 14 days.
Sub-topics to narrow into
A thesis-sized question usually sits inside one of these, combined with a population or a setting.
Mechanisms of resistance
Blair et al. (2015) and Darby et al. (2023) in Nature Reviews Microbiology.
Global burden
Murray et al. (2022) for 2019; Naghavi et al. (2024) for 1990 to 2021 with forecasts.
Biofilms
Stewart and Costerton (2001) and Høiby et al. (2010) on why bacteria in biofilms resist treatment.
Resistance gene databases and tools
ResFinder (Zankari et al., 2012), the CARD database and AMRFinderPlus are cited by every genomic study that uses them.
Larsson and Flach (2022) review resistance in the environment.
How to cite these papers
Every paper above has a DOI, a part of the reference that is easy to leave out. Here is one of them, “Origins and Evolution of Antibiotic Resistance” (2010), in the two styles students ask about most:
APA 7th edition
Davies, J., & Davies, D. (2010). Origins and evolution of antibiotic resistance. Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews, 74(3), 417–433. https://doi.org/10.1128/mmbr.00016-10
MLA 9th edition
Davies, Julian, and Dorothy Davies. “Origins and Evolution of Antibiotic Resistance.” Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews, vol. 74, no. 3, 2010, pp. 417–33, https://doi.org/10.1128/mmbr.00016-10.
Check the details against the article itself before you submit: databases, including the one behind this page, sometimes carry the online-first year rather than the volume year. Full rules and more examples are in our guides to APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, Vancouver and ABNT, with the rest in the citation guides. You can also format a reference from its DOI with our free citation tools.
Frequently asked questions
How many deaths does antimicrobial resistance cause?
Murray et al. (2022) estimated that in 2019 about 4.95 million deaths were associated with bacterial AMR, of which 1.27 million were directly attributable to it. Naghavi et al. (2024) extend the series from 1990 to 2021 and forecast to 2050. Cite the attributable and associated figures separately, because they answer different questions.
Why are database papers among the most cited?
Tools such as ResFinder (Zankari et al., 2012), CARD (Jia et al., 2017; Alcock et al., 2019, 2023) and AMRFinderPlus (Feldgarden et al., 2021) are cited whenever a study uses them to identify resistance genes in sequence data. High citation counts here reflect use as a method, not influence as an argument.
Antimicrobial or antibiotic resistance: which term should I search?
Antibiotic resistance refers to bacteria. Antimicrobial resistance is broader and also covers resistance in fungi, viruses and parasites; it is the term used by the WHO, whose fact sheet (https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/antimicrobial-resistance) says AMR occurs when bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites do not respond to antimicrobial medicines. Titles on this page use both terms, so search both.
How this page was made
The lists come from OpenAlex, an open index of scholarly works whose data are published under a CC0 licence, queried on September 21, 2026 for works whose title matches ("antimicrobial resistance" OR "antibiotic resistance"). Only works with a DOI are listed. Each one was checked against the publisher’s own record at Crossref or DataCite (title, year, first author, journal, volume and pages), and in three cases, where the publisher deposited no byline, against PubMed; anything OpenAlex or Crossref flags as retracted was left out, and an editor took out results that matched the words but not the subject. Citation counts are OpenAlex’s on that date and are usually lower than Google Scholar’s, which counts more kinds of document. Ranking by citations tells you what a field has relied on, not what is correct; several heavily cited papers on any topic are cited because later work disputes them. Books without a DOI are missing, which matters in fields where the founding text is a book.
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