How Many Neurosurgeons Does It Take to Author an Article and What Are the Other Factors That Impact Citations?

Background: A scientific publication is a mirror that defines the image of a researcher in his academic and professional world. Neurosurgery and Journal of Neurosurgery (JNS) are the 2 most reputed journals in the neurosurgical community.

Methods: We evaluated all the original articles published in these 2 journals in the last issue of the year/December (2000-2019). We excluded all review articles and determined number of authors, institutions, and highest educational degrees. Individual abstracts were evaluated for the nature of the study, population, and citations with individual and comparative statistical analyses.

Results: A total of 682 original articles were analyzed. Neurosurgery had an increase in the number of authors (8.0 ± 4.11 compared with 5.65 ± 1.99), an increase in title word count (15.14 ± 5.05 from 13.2 ± 4.46), and an increase in basic science research (0.9% to 11.6%). Retrospective studies increased in JNS (35.8% to 46.8%), with fewer studies on animals (18.4% to 8.1%). An increase in number of authors from 6.1 ± 2.6 to 7.2 ± 3.2 and title count was similar. Between the 2 journals, the citation score for JNS improved faster compared with Neurosurgery, consistently. Studies of adult patients received more citations than did animal or pediatric studies. Clinical research garnered 19% more citations along with research with more collaborating institutes (coefficient = 3.5). Title count had a weak negative correlation to citations received.

Conclusions: Multiauthor and multi-institutional studies ensure greater expertise and thus better impact. Limited by the sample size, only a weak correlation was found with increased title count and retrospective studies with citations, although their increase is an indicator of future trends. Both journals have shown a steady increase in their impact and quality of publications. To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first to examine the correlation of various factors and citations in neurosurgery in the post-2000 era.