Heavy
Hitters, Outsized Influence
  n
this issue, Science Watch features a listing of the five institutions that have been most cited in each of
18 fields in the last decade (1991-February 2001). These are the heavy hitters of science. In general, each not only published in quantity but also exerted outsized influence on the world's research community, as reflected in their tremendous citation tallies.
To compile these rankings,  Science Watch turned to ISI Essential Science Indicators® (ESI), a new web database covering upwards of 7 million articles in 22 broad fields of the sciences and social sciences. Each field is defined by a set of journals, all indexed by ISI. ESI
will henceforth be updated every two
months...
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 NMIT's Lisa Randall on The
Other Warp Factor
 s theoretical physicists grow ever more enamored of the mathematical beauty of string theory, they have left the world of experimental physics increasingly far behind. Until recently, that is. In the past two years, physicists have raised the possibility that at least one of the extra dimensions postulated by string theory could be large enough to have experimental implications. This counter-intuitive proposition might solve some of the thornier theoretical problems of string theory, while providing experimental physicists with some testable predictions.
"It took a while for people to be convinced of the significance, or even to believe infinite-dimensional theory," says Lisa Randall of MIT. "It was actually quite a radical idea that you don’t have to compactify space."
The particular theory that the New York Times recently described as "currently causing all the intellectual commotion" was proposed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Lisa Randall and
Raman Sundrum, then a postdoc at Boston University and now...
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