The 100 Most-Cited Articles About Convection-Enhanced Delivery to the Brain: A Bibliometric Analysis

Background: Convection-enhanced delivery (CED) overcomes the blood-brain barrier to deliver therapy within the central nervous system. Our aim was to evaluate citation and other bibliometric characteristics of the 100 most-cited articles about CED to the brain to better understand the state of research efforts in the field. Methods: Elsevier's Scopus database was searched for the 100 most-cited articles that focused on CED to the brain. Articles were dichotomized as either primarily basic science (BSc) or clinical (CL) articles. Various bibliometric parameters were summarized, and BSc and CL articles were compared. Results: Of the 100 most-cited articles, 64 (64%) were BSc and 36 (36%) were CL. The most common indications reported were brain tumors (59%) and Parkinson disease (5%). Overall median values were as follows: citation count, 102 (range, 70–933); citation rate per year, 9.0 (range, 3.7–49.4); number of authors, 5 (range, 1–25); and publication year, 2006 (range, 1994–2015). Articles were published in a total of 48 different journals, and predominately originated in the United States (n = 78, 78%). BSc and CL articles were statistically comparable in terms of bibliometric parameters. Conclusions: In the 100 most-cited articles about CED to the brain, there were more BSc articles compared with CL articles; however, they were comparable with respect to the reported bibliometric parameters. Given that the peak year of publication of these articles was more than a decade ago, we anticipate that the field will shift toward more CL articles once effective therapies to be delivered via CED are discovered.