Citation analysis of the most influential articles on traumatic spinal cord injury.

Objective: We conducted a citation analysis in order to catalog and pay tribute to the 100 most influential clinical research articles in traumatic spinal cord injury. Design: The Thomson Reuters Web of Science was searched in a two-step process without time period limitations. Review articles were excluded. In the first stage of data extraction, a Boolean query was used to identify the top 100 most cited clinical papers on traumatic spinal cord injury. One hundred and seven keywords were manually chosen and extracted from titles and abstracts. A second Boolean query used these keywords to broaden search results. The top 100 articles from this second stage search comprised the final list. Outcome Measures: For each article, measures evaluated were number of citations, average number of citations per year, time elapsed before first citation, and time elapsed until the year in which each article received its respective highest number of citations in a one-year period. Results: 119,991 articles were found in the second stage search. The top 100 most cited articles meeting inclusion criteria were identified within the first 2,104 results. Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation was the most represented journal, with 20 of the top 100 articles. The top 100 list averaged 255 citations per article. The most highly cited article was the NASCIS 2 trial by Bracken et al ., cited 1500 times, which investigated the efficacy of methylprednisolone or naloxone for spinal cord injury. Conclusion: Clinical research in traumatic spinal cord injury has grown over time, expanding to encompass rehabilitation and experimental therapies in addition to acute management trials. The list may serve as an archive and reference for further studies in this field.