Fifty top-cited classic papers in orthopaedic oncology: a bibliometric analysis

Introduction Citation analysis has been used to evaluate the impact of papers in medicine. There has been multitude of orthopaedic oncology-related papers in literature, to our knowledge no citation analysis of orthopaedic oncology papers has been performed. We identified the 50 most-cited orthopaedic oncology papers and evaluated these papers in terms of their time of publication, source journals, countries, institutions, authors, and main topics. Materials and methods Science citation index expanded was searched in April 2018 for citations of papers published in 77 selected journals since the beginning of the database. The 50 most-cited orthopaedic oncology papers were identified and evaluated. Results The number of citations for the top 50 papers ranged from 168 to 1162 (mean 308). These papers were published between 1957 and 2010. 1990s was the most productive decade, with 19 papers of the list. All papers were written in English and they were published in a total of 6 journals. The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery-Am published the largest number of papers with 31, followed by Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research with 8. The top 50 papers were created mainly from US and Japan, respectively, with 33 and 5. Conclusions It is difficult to define the exact impact of a single paper in the literature. In doing citation analysis, it provides us perspective in the history and progress of orthopaedic oncology.