The 100 Most Cited Papers About Trigeminal Neuralgia, What Have We Learned

Background: Citation analysis is a systematic approach for identifying scientific publications that have a high impact in the scientific or medical community by measuring the number of times that article has been cited. For this purpose, the Institute for Scientific Information collects citation counts for academic journals in the Science Citation Index. Although bibliometric analyses have been performed on neurosurgery, skull base surgery, and neurology, little is known about the most frequently cited articles specifically related to Trigeminal Neuralgia. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to identify, using the citation count, articles that have made key contributions in the field and are driving or have driven the management of Trigeminal Neuralgia.

Objective: The authors’ objective was to identify the 100 most-cited research articles on Trigeminal neuralgia.

Methods: The Thomson Reuters Web of Science service was queried for the years 1900–2017 without language restrictions. Articles were sorted in descending order of the number of times they were cited by other studies, and all titles and abstracts were screened to identify the research areas of the top 100 articles. The number of citations per year was calculated.

Results: The authors identified the 100 most-cited articles on Trigeminal neuralgia, which collectively had been cited 21,092 times at the time of this writing. The top cited article was cited 3008 times with an average of 752 citations per year since publication. The top 5 cited papers were cited a total of 5133 times representing 24% of the total citations among the top 100 most cited papers. The oldest article had been published in 1934 and the most recent in 2013; the most prolific decade was the 2000s, with 39 articles on this list having been published during that period. 33 unique journals contributed to the 100 articles, with the Journal of Neurosurgery contributing most of the articles (n = 25). The most common country of article origin was the United States (n = 47), followed by United Kingdom (n = 144), Italy (n = 7) and Sweden (n = 5).

Conclusion: This study identified the 100 most-cited research articles in Trigeminal neuralgia. The study highlighted the multidisciplinary and multimodal nature of Trigeminal neuralgia management. Recognition of important historical contributions to this field may guide future investigations.