Scientific authorship in neurosurgery.

Area of Science:

• Neurosurgery
• Bibliometrics
• Scientific publishing

Background:

• Assessing scientific output relies on journal impact factor (IF) and author h-index.
• Co-authorship influence in Spanish neurosurgery requires detailed bibliometric analysis.

Purpose of the Study:

• To estimate bibliographic production among Spanish neurosurgeons.
• To evaluate the impact of co-authorship on scientific influence.

Main Methods:

• A PubMed search identified papers from 183 neurosurgeons in Madrid and Castilla y León.
• Data collected included journal type, article count, author order, total IF, Personal Authorship Quotient (PAQ), and Personal Impact Quotient (PIQ).

Main Results:

• 3,592 articles were published by 183 authors across 412 journals; only 9.9% were dedicated neurosurgery journals.
• Neurosurgeons published an average of 20 articles, with 57.7% in neurosurgical journals.
• Average PAQ was 0.367 and average PIQ was 0.317, decreasing with increased publication volume.

Conclusions:

• Spanish neurosurgeons publish approximately 50% of their work in neurosurgical journals, with first/second author positions in one-third of cases.
• PAQ and PIQ metrics effectively mitigate the inflation of credit from extensive co-authorship.
• These quotients enable more accurate comparisons of scientific contributions across authors and disciplines.