Introduction No studies have sought to provide a quantitative or qualitative critique of the research produced in the field of neurointerventional (NI) surgery. We designed a pilot study to analyze recent publications from the Journal of Neurointerventional Surgery (JNIS) to understand the current state of NI research and collaboration.

Methods We reviewed all JNIS Online First publications from February 25, 2015 to February 24, 2016. All publications including human or non-human research, systematic reviews, meta-analyzes or literature reviews were included; editorials and commentaries were excluded. For each publication, study design, number of patients, authors, and contributing centers and study subject were recorded. Level of evidence was defined for each study using a novel scale (Table 1).

Results A total of 206 JNIS research articles met inclusion criteria. The average number of centers and authors per study was 2.1 (standard deviation 1.6, range 1–10) and 6.8 (SD 2.9, range 1–17), respectively. Only 4% of published studies were prospective studies (Table 2). Twenty-eight percent of scientific research published featured patient series of 9 or less. Forty-seven percent of publications involved individuals from a single center, with the vast majority (87%) having collaboration of individuals from 3 centers or less (Table 3). While 256 distinct institutions from all over the world were represented, 66% of centers were represented in only a single publication. The majority of publications were categorized as poor quality (level 4 or 5) evidence (91%; Table 4).

Conclusions This pilot study designed to assess the quality of research and inter-institution collaboration suggests that most published NI research is of low quality with few contributing institutions. Observations from this study therefore support the need for collaborative, multicenter prospective databases of NI cases.

Disclosures K. Fargen: None. J. Mocco: None. A. Rai: None. J. Hirsch: None.