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Top 20 Authors

The Cassini-Huygens and Mars Express missions involve large teams composed of dozens of planetary researchers. Because of sociological factors in the way space science is conducted, the most highly cited authors are publishing alongside many colleagues on most highly cited papers.

Jean-Pierre Bibring, Yves Langevin, François Poulet, Brigitte Gondet, and Aline Gendrin are at the Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale, Orsay, France, which is the lead institution for the OMEGA spectrometer on Mars Express. The high citation rates justly reflect the great impact of this investigation on contributing to our present knowledge of the hydrological history of the Martian surface.

A second cluster of authors is associated with Cassini-Huygens. Athena Coustenis and Pierre Drossart of the Observatoire Paris-Meudon, as well as Jonathan I. Lunine of the University of Arizona and the University of Rome Tor Vergata and Ralph D. Lorenz of Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory all have a large number of papers about Titan to their credit. The Cassini Equinox Mission has extended the operational lifetime and funding of the spacecraft until 2017. The Imaging Science Subsystem continues to surprise Titan specialists.

The magnetic environments of giant planets are a specialty of Michele K. Dougherty of Imperial College London. She has 181 papers to her credit, and is the highest-ranking author in terms of output of papers, followed by Andrew J. Coates of University College London, who is interested in the plasma environment of Saturn. Christopher T. Russell of UCLA is another highly cited author who is a co-investigator using Cassini's magnetometer.