The 50 most cited articles in pediatric orthopedic surgery.

Quantity of citation is often used as a surrogate measurement of an article's importance or relevance in a given field. To date, there has been no study on citation quantity or density in pediatric orthopedics. We present such an analysis. We reviewed all articles in the ISI web of science under the subheading 'orthopedics' to find articles of relevance to pediatric orthopedic surgeons. We subsequently analyzed the characteristics of the most cited articles in terms of the level of evidence, journal of publication, and subcategory of pediatric orthopedics. The majority of the top 50 articles in pediatric orthopedics were from the 1970s and 1980s. All the articles were in English. Uncontrolled case series comprised the largest single level of evidence (level IV). We describe the top 50 articles in pediatric orthopedics by citation and citation density. The level of evidence for highly cited papers was low. Although many of these articles were written by the great thinkers of our field, a need exists for more rigorous methodology.