In the past decade, researchers have made great progress in the field of orthopedics. However, the research status of different countries is unclear. To summarize the number of published articles, we assessed the cumulative impact factors in top orthopedic journals. The aims of the study were to measure: (1) the quality and quantity of publications in orthopedics-related journals from China and other five counties; (2) the trend of the number of publications in orthopedics-related journals.

The related journals were selected based on the 2014 scientific citation index (SCI) and articles were searched based on the PubMed database. To assess the quantity and quality of research output, the number of publications including clinical trials, randomized controlled trials, meta-analyses, case reports, reviews, citations, impact factors, number of articles in the top 10 journals and most popular journals were recorded.

A total of 143,138 orthopedics articles were published from 2005 to 2014. The USA accounts for 24.9% (35,763/143,138) of the publications, followed by UK (7878/143,138 [5.5%]), Japan (7133/143,138 [5.0%]), Germany (5942/143,138 [4.2%]), China (4143/143,138 [2.9%]) and France (2748/143,138 [1.9%]). The ranking for accumulated impact factors as follows: USA, UK, Japan, Germany, France and China. The mean impact factor's order is USA, China, Germany, Japan, France, UK, and interestingly, the mean impact factors in Japan is similar to the Germany in 2005–2014. The USA had the highest percentage of articles in the top 10 journals, while China owns the least. The USA had the highest number of average citations, while Japan had lowest number of average citations.

According to this study, we can conclude that the USA has had been leading the orthopedics research in the past 10 years. Although China still falls behind, it has made considerable progress in the orthopedics research, not only in quantity but also quality. Level of evidence is IV.