[Disk surgery--neurosurgery, orthopedic surgery or both?]

Bibliometric methods have been used to study the distribution of research literature on disc surgery between neurological and orthopaedic departments globally and within each of the Nordic countries. Worldwide, the total number of indexed papers was found to be almost twice as great for neurosurgical as for orthopedic institutions. Though figures for the Nordic countries were lower, they manifested the same trend, except those for Sweden where orthopaedic surgeons appear to do more research than neurosurgeons in this field. Moreover, it was found that a greater proportion of neurosurgeons than orthopaedic surgeons had published papers in journals outside their own field (29 vs 9 per cent respectively), and that 14 per cent of the neurosurgical reports had been published in orthopedic journals, but none of the orthopedic reports had been published in neurosurgical journals. Finally, scrutiny of the reference literature cited in randomly selected samples of papers from neurosurgical and orthopedic departments showed 22 per cent of the references in neurosurgical papers to be to orthopaedic journals or textbooks, but only 4 per cent of those in orthopedic papers to be to neurosurgical texts. The possible implications of these findings are discussed in the article, as are the methodological sources of error.