Original ArticlePredictors of Citations in Neurosurgical Research
Introduction
In recent years there has been an increase in the volume of research, along with multiple efforts to quantify the productivity of researchers and the influence of study results. One long-standing measure of research impact is the journal impact factor, which is calculated based on the number of citations received by an article published in a given journal. Though somewhat controversial for the ways in which this calculation can be skewed, the impact factor is a well-recognized measure of the significance of scientific research. Given the limitations of this one calculation, however, the field of bibliometrics has emerged with many measures and indices developed to analyze research productivity and quality.1 The number of citations an article receives, also referred to as the citation rate, is arguably the most important measure of impact for published research. The citation rate has important bibliometric implications not only for the article itself, but also for that of the authors, the institutions, and the journal.
Researchers have previously investigated features that may predict citation rates in published medical research in many specialties including cardiovascular, emergency medicine, plastic surgery, orthopedic surgery, transplant, and urology.2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 In the field of neurosurgery, however, there has yet to be any rigorous published analysis evaluating predictors of citations within neurosurgical publications or the effect of article study design, subject, level of evidence (LOE), or collaboration in obtaining future citations. With the expanding emphasis on bibliometrics, journal impact factor, and research productivity within academic neurosurgery, it is important to establish factors that may influence research impact within our specialty. We therefore sought to examine characteristics of neurosurgical articles, and identify predictive factors for future citations using a previously established database of nearly 4000 neurosurgical publications.
Section snippets
Methods
All articles published in print between January 2015 and December 2015 in 14 English-language neurosurgical journals were reviewed as part of a prior pilot study to capture the LOE and international collaboration present within published neurosurgical literature. Detailed methodology regarding the data collection methods and results can be found elsewhere.11 In brief, data were collected regarding authorship, number of contributing centers, study design, study subject, and LOE for all
Results
A total of 3981 articles were published in the 14 journals in 2015 and were initially reviewed. There were 22 scientific articles and 36 editorial articles with either missing data or that were not traceable in either WoS or GS and were excluded from further analysis. Thus, a total of 3923 articles were analyzed comprising 2867 scientific articles (72.6%) and 1056 editorial articles (27.4%). Descriptive statistics for the articles and citations are shown in Table 1. LOE, study design,
Discussion
The present study is the largest and most comprehensive review of neurosurgical literature citation rates, with nearly 4000 published articles reviewed across 14 journals, and 2.5 years' worth of citation data collected for each article from 2 independent citation search engines. This analysis demonstrates that certain tangible factors are highly predictive of citation rate and include higher levels of evidence, institutional and international collaboration, and publication in a journal with a
Conclusions
This is the largest and most in-depth investigation analyzing predictors of citations for neurosurgical published literature. Factors found to be most influential on citation rates included the study's level of evidence, number of participating centers, number of authors, and the publishing journal's impact factor.
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Conflict of interest statement: The authors declare that the article content was composed in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.