Orthopaedic publications receive fewer citations than general medicine articles: a scientometric analysis of temporal trends

Abstract Background Orthopaedics, as a surgical speciality with a structurally narrower citing audience and lower citation density than general medicine, is systematically disadvantaged in any cross-disciplinary comparison relying on absolute citation counts. Whether this disadvantage is stable or has changed over time has not been previously quantified. Methods The 100 most-cited articles indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection were identified for medicine and orthopaedics in 2014 and 2024. Citation data were extracted from a single snapshot taken on 19 January 2026. Total citations and citation velocity, defined as citations per year since publication, were compared between fields and across time points using Mann-Whitney U tests. Ratio-based analyses and distributional characteristics were also assessed. Results Median citation counts were substantially higher in medicine than in orthopaedics in both years, reaching 5055 versus 288 in 2014 and 720.5 versus 34.0 in 2024, corresponding to 17.6- and 21.2-fold differences, respectively. Citation velocity followed the same pattern, with medicine maintaining an approximately 17- to 21-fold advantage at both time points. Within-field temporal analysis showed that citation velocity remained broadly stable in medicine between cohorts, whilst orthopaedics demonstrated reduced early citation accrual in the more recent cohort. Citation distributions were more right-skewed in medicine, with a small number of articles accounting for a disproportionate share of total citations, whereas orthopaedic citations were more evenly distributed across the top 100. Conclusions Orthopaedics demonstrated substantially lower citation performance than general medicine articles, and this gap appeared to persist over time.