The impact of 10 years of war on combat casualty care research

Abstract

Abstract : October 7, 2011, marked the end of the 10th year of US combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. As in previous conflicts, these wars have led to major advances in treating combat casualties, and the advances are also being translated into injury management paradigms in civilian trauma centers. Coincident with these advances was an increase in combat casualty research directed toward identifying new methods for saving lives and reducing the long-term disability resulting from battlefield injuries. A review of the scientific literature published during this period can be used to evaluate the research on combat casualty care conducted during the recent conflicts. One approach for determining the influence of individual articles is to measure the number of citations or the acknowledgments that one article receives from another.6 Previous citation studies have focused on trauma research in general7 and on the vascular surgery literature,8 but to our knowledge, no previous citation analyses have been reported for combat casualty care. The objective of this article was to identify and assess the relative impact of the top 50 most frequently cited articles on combat casualty care published during the first 10 years of war.