Subspecialty Variation in Academic Citations of Orthopedic Surgery Publications

The objective of this study was to assess the variation in academic citation and social media mentions across orthopedic subspecialties in general orthopedic surgery journals.

An internet-based study was performed of 666 articles from four orthopedic journals published from January 2018 to February 2019. Each publication was categorized by its subspecialty within orthopedics: arthroplasty, hand and upper extremity, foot and ankle, orthopedic oncology, pediatric orthopedics, shoulder, spine, sports medicine, orthopedic trauma, basic science, and miscellaneous. For each publication, academic citations were quantified using Google Scholar and Web of Science, and social media mentions were quantified using Twitter. Comparisons of continuous data among various subspecialties were performed using analysis of variance.

The average number of citations per publication was 7.4 ± 9.0 on Google Scholar, 4.5 ± 5.3 on Web of Science, and 2.8 ± 8.7 on Twitter. The number of academic citations differed significantly by subspecialty on Google Scholar (p < 0.001) and Web of Science (p < 0.001). There was no difference in social media mentions on Twitter by subspecialty (p = 0.8). The most highly cited subspecialties, adjusted for number of publications, were arthroplasty, orthopedic oncology, and sports medicine, while the least highly cited subspecialties were hand and upper extremity, pediatric orthopedics, and orthopedic basic science.

There is significant baseline variation in the citation of orthopedic publications among various subspecialties. Our findings argue against the use of a uniform threshold to gauge scholarly success in orthopedic surgery. The variation in citation of orthopedic publications across subspecialties support the use of subspecialty-specific benchmarks to gauge academic productivity.