Top 50 most cited articles on primary tumors of the spine.

Citation analysis was performed in order to identify the top 50 most cited articles pertaining to the field of primary spinal tumors. This collection of articles highlights important trends in the neurosurgical literature. We searched the Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge in order to identify articles pertaining to primary tumors of the spine. Impertinent articles were removed. The top 50 most cited articles were identified. Thereafter, article characteristics were determined including article type, article topic, level of evidence, and citation rate. The selected articles were published between 1951 and 2008. The most productive year was 1997 with 6 publications. The top 50 articles were published in twenty-two different journals, most commonly in Neurosurgery (12), Journal of Neurosurgery (8), and Spine (6). The most frequently cited article was by Tomita et al. written in 1997 which described total en bloc spondylectomy as a novel surgical technique in management of primary tumors of the vertebral column. We identified the 50 most-cited articles in the field of primary spinal tumors. This collection of articles serves as a reference for recognizing impactful studies in the field.