Measuring Research Impact Through Citation Patterns: A Decade of Bariatric Surgery Literature

Background: Identifying impactful research is increasingly challenging. Citation count cannot distinguish innovative from incremental work. The disruption index (DI) quantifies this by measuring how research is cited. DI scores range from -1 to 1, where positive scores indicate paradigm-shifting, disruptive contributions, while negative scores indicate those that consolidate existing research. DI has been applied to surgical specialties to identify influential research and guide funding. Despite rapid growth in bariatric surgery literature, no study has evaluated disruption patterns in this field. Objectives: To characterize disruption patterns in bariatric surgery literature from 2010-2020. Setting: Academic research study. Methods: We queried MEDLINE and EMBASE for bariatric surgery articles (2010-2020). DI was calculated using the Semantic Scholar API. Articles were categorized as disruptive (DI>0), consolidating (DI<0), or neutral (DI=0); those with <5 citations were excluded. We analyzed temporal trends, DI-citation correlations, and characteristics of highly disruptive papers (p<0.05). Results: Among 20,428 articles, mean DI indicated slight consolidation (-0.00073 ±0.006). Consolidating articles increased over five-fold faster than disruptive articles (110% vs 19% growth). Citation count weakly correlated with DI (r=0.21, p<0.001). Disruptive papers had higher citations (64.0±258.3 vs 45.8±66.4, p <0.001) and fewer authors (5.3±3.8 vs 6.2±4.7 authors, p <0.001). Reviews and case reports demonstrated higher disruption than primary studies and clinical trials. Conclusions: This is the first DI analysis of bariatric surgery. The field demonstrates increasing consolidation while disruptive work remained stable. Weak DI-citation correlation confirms these metrics measure different impacts, which can guide funding toward transformative research. Our automated approach is scalable to other specialties.