FEATURED ANALYSIS, Jan./Feb. 2008

To assess high-impact research in molecular biology & genetics over the last five years, ScienceWatch.com turned to an elite selection of papers: those ranking among the top 1% most cited in the field for their respective years of publication, among papers published and cited between 2002 and 2006. This benchmark, applied to a special five-year subset of reports collected in the "Highly Cited Papers" area of Thomson Scientific’s Essential Science Indicators^SM database, produced a file of some 1,300 papers published in Thomson-indexed journals of molecular biology & genetics.

(The analysis included pertinent papers published in the multidisciplinary journals Nature, Science, and PNAS.)

From this population of high-impact reports, ScienceWatch.com identified the institutions, authors, and journals most heavily represented.

#Table 1 (below) features institutions that fielded at least 10 high-impact reports over the five-year period. In the left-hand column, institutions are ranked by total citations, while the right column ranks institutions by impact, or cites per paper. Listings in table 2 (below) specify individual researchers who each contributed to at least eight high-impact reports, along with journals (table to the right) that published 20 or more such papers.

As was the case when Science Watch last surveyed high-impact research in this field (11[5]: 1-2, September-October 2000), the Howard Hughes Medical Institute garnered the highest citation total of any institution, with nearly 38,000 collective cites. HHMI-affiliated authors, in fact, contributed to 199 high-impact reports, a total approached only by Harvard’s 165 papers.

(As the previous survey noted, HHMI employs and supports researchers who are based at numerous universities and institutions. In tallying citations to papers by Hughes investigators, Science Watch credited both HHMI and the investigators’  home-base institutions, since Hughes investigators usually list both affiliations in their papers, and since such papers often include the contributions of non-Hughes-supported coauthors at each institution.)

In the cites-per-paper column, no institution surpassed the University of California, Santa Cruz, even though UCSC fielded only 13 high-impact molecular biology & genetics reports during the five-year period. One of these, however, was the most-cited paper in the survey, a 2002 Nature report on the mouse genome (Mouse Genome Sequencing Consortium, Nature 420[6915]: 520-62, 2002). This paper has now been cited more than 1,700 times.

Among the 200-plus coauthors on this blockbuster mouse-genome report was MIT’s Eric S. Lander, who topped the researcher list with 22 high-impact reports. (The list is ranked by number of high-impact papers, with the subsequent order determined by total citations). Lander also contributed to highly cited genomic studies centered on yeast, the chimpanzee, and the domestic dog.

Christopher King is the Editor of the Science Watch^® Newsletter.

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