A Bibliometric Analysis of the Top 50 Most Influential Articles on External Ventricular Drains

External ventricular drains (EVDs) are commonly used to remove cerebrospinal fluid and monitor intracranial pressure in patients with neurological dysfunction. Often the first invasive procedure learned in training, ventricular drain placement is the quintessential neurosurgical procedure. This bibliometric analysis highlights the top contributing EVD articles in current evidence-based practice.

The Scopus database was used to perform a title-specific, keyword-based search for all publications until September 2022. The keywords "external ventricular drain" or "EVD" or "external ventriculostomy" were used. The 50 most cited articles were selected for analysis. Parameters included the following: title, citation count, citations per year, authors, specialty of first author, institution, country of origin, publishing journal, Source Normalized Impact per Paper, and Hirsch index.

The keyword-based search showed that 8464 articles on EVDs were published between 1991 and 2022. The top 50 articles were published between 1999 and 2019. The top 50 articles acquired a total of 3343 citations with an average of 66.86 citations per paper. The rate of self-citations accounted for an average of 5.16% of the total number of citations. A majority of the top 50 articles focused on EVD infection and placement accuracy. The first and second most cited papers were authored by Zabramski et al and Fried et al, respectively.

The bibliometric analysis provides a quantitative overview of how topics and interventions are analyzed in academic medicine. In the present study, we evaluated the global trends in EVDs by analyzing the top 50 most cited papers.