A study published in Spine examines the top 50 articles published on minimally invasive spine surgery.
The study authors examined the top 50 articles based on citations from Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar. The researchers found:
1. "Extreme Lateral Interbody Fusion (XLIF): a novel surgical technique for anterior lumbar interbody fusion" had the most citations. Burak Ozgur, MD, was lead author on the article.
2. The top article received 447 citations on Google Scholar, 239 citations on Web of Science and 279 citations on Scopus.
3. Overall, the top 50 articles had the following citation ranges on the sites:
• Web of Science: 27 to 239
• Scopus: 60 to 279
• Google Scholar: 104 to 462
4. The articles studied spanned 14 different topics and most dealt with the outcomes related to MIS spine surgery.
5. Most of the citations were level III and level IV studies, likely due to the recent nature of MIS techniques. The study authors recommended further level I and level II studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of MIS techniques in the future.