Egyptian neurosurgical publication productivity. A retrospective analysis from 2015 to 2020

Medical research is an essential factor in the development of proper healthcare services. Neurosurgical education during the past century was enormous. There was a quantum leap in scientific research. This study aims to explore the advancement of neurosurgery research in Egypt during the last five years. We searched PubMed, Scopus, and Google Scholar for neurosurgery articles. We used the official name of the medical school from the World Dictionary of Medical Schools (WDOMS). We filtered the searching results from January 2015 to December 2020. We checked about 693 publications from January 2015 to December 2020. We arranged them by the number of publications, the highest impact factor reported, and the most frequent journal targeted. From 2015 to 2020, there was an increase in the annual publication productivity, by each year. Most of the publications were about spine (n = 230, 33.2%) and trauma (n = 183, 26.4%). Our study shows that neurosurgery research is confined to specific regions in Egypt. We should investigate the possible causes of poor neurosurgery academic advancement of it in Egypt. However, since this study was conducted in the era of COVID-19, it impacted with some limitations. Majorly, COVID-19 pandemic affected the research productivity around the world, and we hypothesize that it affected the publications productivity rate in the Egyptian neurosurgical community.