Femoroacetabular Impingement and Labral Tear: From the Most Highly Cited Articles to Research Interests

Objective: To highlight the characteristics of the most highly cited articles and propose the research interests over the past decades in the field of femoroacetabular impingement (FAI) and labral tear.

Methods: The ISI Web of Science database (Clarivate Analytics, New York, the United States) was utilized for the identification of articles on 15 December 2020. FAI and labral tear-related articles (1138 articles) were retrieved, of which the 100 most-cited articles (top 100) were identified. Subsequent analysis included citation density (citations/article age), authorship, institution, journal, geographic distribution, level of evidence, and theme.

Results: The number of citations per article ranged from 66 to 1189 with a mean of 163.31. The majority of articles were published in the United States (all articles/top 100 = 655/57) and Switzerland (85/22). University of Bern (n = 10) was the most prolific institution. The journal with the most of articles was Arthroscopy: The Journal of Arthroscopic and Related Surgery. The most prolific coauthor (all articles) or first authors (top 100) was Domb (n = 109) and Philippon (n = 6), respectively. The evidence with the most articles is level IV (n = 41). The top three most popular topics of research article were outcomes of surgery (n = 23), imaging diagnosis (n = 18), and comparison of surgery (n = 8). The top four most prevalent themes of review were labral tears (n = 3), FAI (n = 3), comparison of surgery imaging diagnosis, and outcomes of surgery (both n = 2). Six keywords with the newest average publication year, including FAI syndrome (average publication year = 2019.50), patient-reported outcomes (2019.43), femoroplasty (2018.60), clinical outcomes (2018.17), borderline dysplasia (2018.00), and capsule (2018.00). Five keywords with the highest average citations, including outcome (average citations = 88.50), alpha angle (58.00), complications (55.86), revision hip arthroscopy (49.00), and systematic review (46.14).

Conclusions: Outcomes research is the most popular research interest and patient-reported outcome instruments might be further and widely used in the emerging articles in the near future. The field of FAI and labral tear has shown an obvious trend of development and is steadily evolving. It could be predicted that there will be an increasing number of publications in the following years, with the United States and Switzerland maintaining leadership in this field.