The 100 most-cited articles on vestibular schwannoma: historical perspectives, current limitations, and future research directions

• Published in: Neurosurgical review 2021-12, Vol.44 (6), p.2965-2975
• Main Authors: Martinez-Perez, Rafael, Ung, Timothy H., Youssef, A. Samy
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Medicine; Medicine & Public Health; Neurosurgery; Review
• ISSN: 0344-5607; 1437-2320
• DOI: 10.1007/s10143-021-01487-4

There has been a steady increase of vestibular schwannoma (VS) research in the body of literature. To delineate the most impactful works on VS, a bibliometric analysis is warranted. The Thomson Reuters Web of Sciences database was queried to identify all articles on VS published to June 2020. The articles were sorted in descending order of the number of citations. Titles and abstracts of the top 100 most-cited articles were screened to identify the research area, publication year, author, and country of publication. Our query yielded 6477 research publications. The 100 most-cited articles were cited 15804 times. The most productive decade was the 1990s (40% of the top 100 articles). Twenty-five journals contributed to all included articles. Journal of Neurosurgery contributed most of the articles (20%). Most common contributing country was the USA (60%). “Operative treatment” was the most common research topic (68%), followed by other aspects such as medical management (13%), epidemiology (12%), diagnosis (5%), or translational medicine (2%). The current analysis highlights the importance of the multimodal approach in the study and treatment of VS. While emphasizing the relevance of including highly cited articles in the current education of VS, our results point out the deficiency in certain research areas with high impact in other fields of neuro-oncology, such as translational medicine and molecular epigenetics.