• Cyrus Elahi, Kelly A Shaftel, Tyler S Cole, Nickenig VissociJoão RicardoJRDepartment of Neurosurgery, Barrow Neurological Institute, St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center, Phoenix, Arizona, USA., and Andrew S Little.
• Department of Neurosurgery, Barrow Neurological Institute, St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center, Phoenix, Arizona, USA.
• World Neurosurg. 2024 Apr 1; 184: e360e366e360-e366.

ObjectiveTo describe an intuitive and useful method for measuring the global impact of a medical scholar's research ideas by examining cross-border citations (CBCs) of peer-reviewed neurosurgical publications.MethodsPublication and citation data for a random sample of the top 50 most academically productive neurosurgeons were obtained from Scopus Application Programming Interface. We characterized an author-level global impact index analogous to the widely used h-index, the hglobal-index, defined as the number of published peer-reviewed manuscripts with at least the same number of CBCs. To uncover socioeconomic insights, we explored the hglobal-index for high-, middle-, and low-income countries.ResultsThe median (interquartile range) number of publications and CBCs were 144 (62-255) and 2704 (959-5325), respectively. The median (interquartile range) h-index and hglobal-index were 42 (23-61) and 32 (17-38), respectively. Compared with neurosurgeons in the random sample, the 3 global neurosurgeons had the highest hglobal-indices in low-income countries at 17, 13, and 9, despite below-average h-index scores of 33, 38, and 19, respectively.ConclusionThis intuitive update to the h-index uses CBCs to measure the global impact of scientific research. The hglobal-index may provide insight into global diffusion of medical ideas, which can be used for social science research, author self-assessment, and academic promotion.Copyright © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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