Background The growing concern over concussion in sports has led to the publication of five major summary and agreement, position and consensus statements since 2000. The dissemination of information from these statements is largely unknown and difficult to quantify, but their impact on the research community can be quantified by analysing the number of citations to these key publications. The purpose of this review is to report the number and pattern of citations to the key published statements on sports concussion.

Methods Web of Science, Scopus and PubMed were searched from 2000 to mid-December 2009 using two different search strategies. The first strategy used the search terms ‘concussion’ and ‘first author’ of the statement article, while the second used the ‘title’ of the target article as the key search term.

Results The publications resulting from the three ‘Concussion in Sport’ (CIS) group conferences were cited by 532 journal articles, while the National Athletic Trainers' Association position statement was cited 123 times. The highest number of citations to each of the five identified statements was seen in 2009. British Journal of Sports Medicine was the most frequently cited journal.

Conclusion The citation analysis of the key statements on sports concussion has shown that the target papers have been widely cited in the research literature, with the highest number of citations being from the publications arising from the CIS group conferences. The authors have shown their preference to cite source articles published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.