Endovascular Treatment for Extracranial Carotid Stenosis

Bibliometric analysis is a quantitative method that can evaluate publications related to a specific topic.Methods: A PubMed database search was conducted from 2003 to 2012 using the search term “carotid” AND “stenos*” as a part of the title or abstract.Results: A total of 1590 articles were published in 329 different journals. A total of 751 (47.2%) publications were original articles, 1501 (94.4%) were written in English, 153 (9.6%) received funding, 584 (36.7%) were published by the United States, and 673 (42.3%) resulted from multidisciplinary collaboration. Of the original articles, 538 (71.6%) had retrospective design and 275 (36.6%) had sample size of <50. Vascular surgery departments produced the most articles (n = 339, 21.3%), followed by radiology (n = 270, 17.0%), cardiology (n = 260, 16.4%), neurosurgery (n = 198, 12.5%), and neurology (n = 196, 12.3%). Five major departments published only a small portion (5.1%-26.5%) of articles in their own specialty journals.Conclusion: The publication in journals across disciplines and multidisciplinary collaboration are 2 peculiar characteristics of research in this topic.