The Web of Science (WoS) database was accessed on May 4, 2015. Publications in the Web of science core collection database were searched for publications of all types with authors’ addresses containing “neurosurg*” or “surgical neurology”. The number of publications and other information was obtained. In the first stage, an international comparison of neurosurgeons’ research outputs by country was carried out. Then, the search was divided into two periods, before 2010 (1928–2009) and after 2010 (2010 to present) to extract more detailed information.

Chinese neurosurgical publications were identified using the following search strategy: ((address: neurosurg*) OR (address: surgical neurology)) AND (address: China). Data were extracted from the search results to obtain information such as document type, countries/territories, funding agencies, organizations, publication year, title and research area. Then, the search results were analyzed using the “analyze results” tool on the WoS webpage.

We only included articles in the citation report, excluding reviews, meeting abstracts, letters, editorial material and other document types. We searched for papers with Chinese corresponding authors cited more than 100 times to identify Chinese neurosurgeons playing important roles in research. We also spoke with senior experts in the neurosurgical field and manually retrieved some original documents to ensure a complete survey.

Publications from the departments/institutes of neurosurgery in China and data sources from the Web of science core collection database were searched. The types of publications included articles, letters, reviews, proceedings papers, editorial materials, and more. Analyses included yearly research output, research output over the whole time period, WoS subject category, authors, organizations/institutes that submitted published articles, and the names of journals publishing articles.

Data from WoS were exported to a Microsoft Office® Excel spreadsheet and then transferred to a Microsoft Word document. We considered the top ranked publications in each item. ANOVA, Student’s t-, and c2 tests were used to assess the statistical significance of differences in the mean citation numbers among different study periods (SPSS version 17.0; SPSS Inc., Chicago, IL, USA). A p value <0.05 was considered statistically significant (2-tailed test).

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