Purpose: The objective of this study was to determine whether opinion leaders in the medical community attract more attention than randomized controlled trials (RCT) in shoulder surgery.
Methods: A PubMed search to retrieve all therapeutic and diagnosis RCT shoulder studies was carried out. Three opinion leaders were chosen from among the last ten presidents of the European Shoulder and Elbow Society based on the number of publications. Their studies were also retrieved from PubMed. The metrics of the studies were determined through ResearchGate and Web of Science. The year of publication, impact factor of the journal, level of evidence, number of citations, number of reads, research interest, and reported conflicts of interest were recorded for every study.
Results: Two-hundred forty-five shoulder RCTs and 236 opinion leader studies met the inclusion criteria. The opinion leader studies were read significantly more times than the RCTs (p = 0.04). The mean impact factor for RCT studies was 2.84 (SD 3.9) while it was of 1.99 (SD1.14) in the opinion leader group (p < 0.001). Most of the studies of the opinion leaders were level IV (73.3%), while only 6.3% of their papers were categorized as levels I-II. Conflict of interest was present in 19.6% of the RCTs and in 32.2% of the opinion leader studies (p < 0.001).
Conclusion: The medical community pays more attention to opinion leader studies in shoulder surgery than to RCT studies even though RCTs are published in higher impact factor journals and opinion leader studies are mainly level IV evidence studies.
Keywords: Citations; Conflicts of interest; Impact factor; Opinion leaders; Randomized control trials.