n early November 2000, the Society for Neuroscience (SFN) convened its 30th annual conference in New Orleans, Louisiana. As Science magazine recently observed, in 1970 the SFN's membership numbered barely above 1,000. Thirty years later, some 25,000 neuroscientists packed the latest meeting. That's just one measure of the field's explosive growth, particularly in the last ten years–a period officially inaugurated in 1990 as "the decade of the brain" by President George Bush (the other one).

From the resulting collection of 2,000 highly cited neuroscience papers, ISI identified the institutions, researchers, and journals that accounted for the greatest number of high-impact reports. Institutions appear above, ranked both by total citations to high-impact papers and by citations per paper. Researchers who published at least 12 highly cited papers during the ten-year period are ranked on the table to the right.

In some instances, the institutional names in the table on the following page, represent a unification of several schools, sites, or facilities. The University of London, for example (ranked third by total citations), includes among its institutions University College London, which itself subsumes the Institute of Neurology, home to two of the high-impact authors: Richard S.J. Frackowiak and Christopher D. Frith. The Veterans Administration Medical Center represents more than 150 U.S. research and health-care facilities. And the U.K.'s Medical Research Council comprises a variety of facilities and labs, such as the Molecular Biology Laboratory in Cambridge and the Cyclotron Unit at Hammersmith Hospital, London, site of brain-imaging studies and other neurological research.

The list of researchers includes names familiar to Science Watch: Peter H. Seeburg, Max Planck Institute for Medical Research, Heidelberg, author of the greatest number of high-impact papers, discussed brain receptors and other aspects of his work in these pages nine years ago (3[2]:3-4, February/March 1992). Frackowiak and Frith of the Institute of Neurology were featured at the end of 1999 among the U.K.'s "citation superstars" (10[6]:1-2, November/December 1999), while Shigetada Nakanishi of Kyoto University was similarly singled out in a recent rundown of Japan's citation laureates (11[6]:1-2, November/December 2000). And Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Eric R. Kandel, of course, recently became familiar to the wider world as co-winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize in medicine for his research on the biochemistry of learning and memory.

Notably, four of the scientists on the list–Solomon H. Snyder, Ted M. Dawson, Donald L. Price, and Richard L. Huganir– are associated with Johns Hopkins University.

The most-cited paper in the survey is a 1993 report: "A synaptic model of memory: Long-term potentiation in the hippocampus," by T.V.P Bliss and G.L. Collingridge, Nature, 361[6407]:31-9, 1993; now cited nearly 2,400 times. Second is "Stimulus-transcription coupling in the nervous system: Involvement of the inducible protooncogenes fos and jun," by J.I. Morgan and T. Currant, Annual Review of Neuroscience,, 14:421-51, 1991; cited approximately 1,450 times.

Of the 2,000 papers in the survey, 1,472 bear at least one U.S. author address, while 207 papers list at least one affiliation in England. Other well-represented nations are Germany (175 papers), Canada (137), Japan (81), and France (78).