We read with great interest the recent study by Yin and colleagues. 1 We believe that this study is a meaningful resource with detailed information for orthopedic and neurosurgery physicians who want to assimilate research focus and advance of lumbar spinal stenosis (LSS) within a relatively short period. Researchers can also benefit from emphasis on citation count while citing and evaluating articles and realize the deficiencies when high-level articles appear. We appreciate the authors’ efforts to shed light on this very important issue. However, we noted that the searching results were not in accordance with the method mentioned by the authors, which was uneasily understandable and be confused.
In the part of methods, the authors used the following search command: *lumbar spinal stenosis* OR *lumbar stenosis* OR *lumbar stenosis disorders* and conducted the search in “basic search” feature under the “title” field with a time limit from January 1, 2000, until November 1, 2019 (a span of 20 years) from Web of Science (WOS). However, we would like to point out when I repeated this search process and got a totally different result of the 100 most cited articles on LSS.
Most importantly, we can obtain detailed information of the 100 most cited articles on LSS from the Table 1. From the titles of these articles, we can easily find that LSS are absent from many titles, specifically for the Top 3 articles2-4 with very high citations. Interestingly, when I changed the search command, using *lumbar spinal stenosis* in “basic search” feature under the “topic” field with a time limit from January 1, 2000 until November 1, 2019. I acquired very similar results compared to Table 1 of this study. The rank of the articles was the same. The only difference was that the total citations of each article became larger, which was also easy to understand because of later searching.
Therefore, I am a little bit of puzzled that why this situation happened. In my humble opinion, the searching method at the very beginning is critical for this important study. Another analogous paper published on Global Spine Journal was searched using title-specific search “spondylolisthesis,” 5 which may indicates that this searching method is much more better.
Footnotes
Authors’ Note: Yunzhong Cheng and Lijin Zhou are co-first authors of this article. The manuscript submitted does not contain information about medical device(s)/drug(s).
ORCID iD: Yong Hai, MD, PhD 
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7206-325X
References
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