Assessing the Relevancy of Highly Cited Works in Neurosurgery. Part I: The 100 Most Relevant Papers in Neurosurgical Journals.

Abstract

Bibliometric analyses based on total citation count come with many limitations, which investigators in other fields have overcome using the average number of citations per year since publication. The following study is presented in 2 parts. In this first part, the 100 most relevant articles in neurosurgical journals were identified and ranked by total citations per year since publication. We queried the Web of Science database for the 1000 most-cited articles in neurosurgical journals. The number of citations per year was calculated for these 1000 articles, and the top 100 were identified. Among the top 100 most relevant articles, 63 were from the Journal of Neurosurgery, 26 from Neurosurgery, 7 from the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry, 3 from Acta Neurochirurgica, and 1 from Surgical Neurology. The average year of publication for the 100 most relevant articles is 1995, compared with 1984 for the list of most-cited articles published by Ponce and Lozano in 2010 (P < 0.001). These results suggest that ranking articles based on relevancy rather than historical popularity results in a list of more recently published articles and includes more studies addressing topics of surgical management and outcomes. The ability to appraise the literature in this fashion is worthwhile to those seeking a better understanding of the science underlying modern clinical practice and is thus a highly valuable tool for neurosurgical residents, program directors, and neuroscientists as they acquire an understanding of modern neurosurgery and its scientific foundation.