Trends and Most-Cited Articles on Hemispheric Surgery: A Bibliometric Analysis and Historical Review

Abstract

Introduction: Hemispheric surgery is a multistep, highly effective, and radical surgical procedure in the treatment of drug-resistant epilepsy due to extensive unilateral hemispheric disease. The procedure ranges from a resective procedure (hemispherectomy) to disconnection (hemispherotomy) and has developed substantially over the last century from morbid to elegant, minimally invasive, and routinely practiced procedures. Bearing in mind the numerous articles that have been published on hemispherectomy and hemispherotomy, we aimed to highlight the top 100 cited and impactful articles to create familiarity with the topic. We anticipate that this will be a helpful guide for clinicians and academics navigating the literature on this subject. Methods: A Scopus title-based search on the top 100 most-cited articles on “hemispherectomy” and “hemispherotomy” was performed in September 2023 with no restrictions. The top 100 most-cited articles were then retrieved. The article title, first author, first author’s specialty, country of origin, first author’s institution at the time of publication, journal of publication, year of publication, citation count, and citations per year were collected. The Google Scholar database citation count for each paper was added for correlation and comprehensive coverage. Results: The top 100 most-cited articles were cited 92 times per paper on average. The publication dates ranged from 1949 to 2016. The most frequently cited article “Clinical outcomes of hemispherectomy for epilepsy in childhood and adolescence” with 307 citations was published by A.M. Devlin et al. (2003) in the journal Brain. The USA was the highest publishing country (41 articles). The highest-publishing journal was Neurology. The most prolific first authors were A. Smith, J. Schramm, and J. Villemure, each with four publications. The institution with the most contributions was McGill University and its affiliated Health Centers, with nine publications in total. Neurosurgery was the most common specialty among the first authors. Most of the included studies were cohort studies or case series. Conclusion: We identified the top 100 cited articles on hemispherectomy and hemispherotomy using the Scopus database and supplemented our results with Google Scholar. We highlighted the most prominent authors, institutions, countries, journals, and study designs and illuminated the historical development of hemispherectomy and hemispherotomy procedures, in addition to landmark and currently trending papers.