Reviewed by B.Davies
Reason for the study
The number of times a paper is cited is a common metric of how meaningful that paper is to the scientific community. Generally, papers that are highly cited have a profound impact on their field. If scientists look at the trends of which papers are most cited, it can give us an idea of what topics within a scientific discipline are experiencing the most interest over time.
Methods
The prominent journals publishing research related to the spine were first identified from a database of journals. This list of journals including: Spine, Journal of Spinal Disorders, European Spine Journal, Journal of Spinal Cord Medicine, Spinal Cord, Spine Journal, Journal of Spinal Disorders & Techniques, and Journal of Neurosurgery: Spine were searched using the database Web of Science which provides all articles ever published from the selected journals. Articles were then sorted by most citations and the top 100 cited articles were analysed. Articles were then sorted by topic including,
- Biomechanics
- Cervical myelopathy/Cervical fusion
- Degenerative disc disease, deformity
- Iliac bone graft morbidity
- Low back pain
- Lumbar spinal stenosis/Lumbar fusion
- Neck pain
- Osteoporotic compression fractures
- Psychosocial aspects of neck and low back pain
- Tesearch methodology
- Spinal fusion/implantants and rhBMP-2
- Spinal metasteses (cancer)
- Thoracic fusion
- Trauma/spinal cord injury.
By far the most articles were published in the journal Spine (84/100 articles). This suggests that the journal is publishing a substantial body of the spine research which is both impactful and broadly of-interest to clinicians and researchers of spinal conditions. Ranked according to most articles by topic, low back pain was 1st and had over 2x as many articles represented as any other topic area (22/100 articles). Ranked according to most articles by topic, Cervical myelopathy/Cervical fusion was tied-9th with 3/100 articles. Of these 3, all were on operative techniques for different aspects of cervical myelopathy. The most recent of these 3 articles was published in 2001 (the other 2 were published in 1983 and 1981). Neck pain was 12th.
Why is this important?
The number of times an article was cited is often an indicator of how popular a topic is. This suggests that cervical myelopathy, despite its prevalence and impact upon a person, has received relatively little impactful research. Impactful is an important caveat here; a terrible study, or one that only marginally advances the field, will probably not receive a lot of citations in the future. This means that researchers that look at myelopathy need to produce impactful research that helps us understand mechanisms of the disease, its impact, etc. that may help drive more interest and produce more highly impactful work and better treatments.
It isn’t all doom and gloom, however. On Aug 1, 2018 I searched pubmed (another database of research articles) for all research containing the keywords:
- cervical myelopathy
- cervical Spondylotic myelopathy
- degenerative cervical myelopathy
- cervical laminectomy
- anterior discectomy and fusion
- cervical disc replacement
- cervical corpectomy
- posterior cervical discectomy
and got 24,107 results. Similarly if you search “low back pain, one would get 34,002 results in the same database. This suggests that there is a decent amount of research compared to low back pain, but not nearly in the ball park as other disabling conditions such as multiple sclerosis (~80,000 articles). This suggests that more research is needed in all facets of the disease, but this research also needs to be well designed, rigorous, and impactful. It also means that more publicity is needed for this disease to generate more interest in the scientific community.
References
- Badhiwala JH et al., Highly cited works in spinal disorders: the top 100 most cited papers published in spine journals. Spine. Epub ahead of print Jun 8, 2018