The Most Cited Articles in Hand Surgery Over the Past 20-Plus Years: A Modern-Day Reading List

The fifty highest cited papers in anterior cruciate ligament injury

“…The highest cited paper on this topic has reached 989 citations [19]. This is even more clear, when compared to highest cited papers in hand and shoulder surgery or paediatric orthopaedics [10][11][12][13][14].…”

“…Analyses of most cited papers have been performed in various medical disciplines such as orthopaedic surgery or plastic surgery, various diseases such as burns or osteoporosis and a variety of orthopaedic subspecialties including arthroplasty, shoulder-, foot-or hand surgery [10][11][12][13][14]. However, no such study has been done focusing on BACL injury^.…”

The 50 Most-cited Articles in Orthopaedic Surgery From Mainland China

“…This bibliometric approach examines the frequency and patterns of citations in articles. The number of citations received by an article is an indicator of its scientific impact and provides a useful approach for evaluating a paper's influence in its field [17,37]. Citation analyses have been performed in orthopaedic surgery [17,19] and its subspecialties, including pediatric orthopaedics [16], fracture surgery [1], shoulder surgery [25], foot and ankle surgery [3], spine surgery [24], hand surgery [15], joint arthroplasty [13], and arthroscopy [6].…”

Knee Society Award Papers Are Highly Cited Works

“…However, it is one of the preeminent citation databases; furthermore, because the goal of this article was not to compare the accuracy of individual citation indices, we think that use of an alternative index would be unlikely to change the major findings. Prior bibliometric studies in orthopaedics have also noted the weakness of using a single database but have not offered a realistic solution [2,20]. Finally, we did not exclude self-citation during the database queries.…”

“…However, because the magnitude of the differences between the groups is so large (ie, mean 86 versus 33 citations), exclusion of self-citation would be unlikely, we believe, to change the major findings. Again, recent prior bibliometric studies in orthopaedics either acknowledge this as a limitation of the search strategy used but do not account for this bias or do not state whether self-citations were excluded [1,2,6,8,20].…”