esearchers have made big things happen in recent years by fashioning extremely small objects. Science Watch, therefore, decided to survey nanotechnology research over the last decade. The table on the following page ranks institutions according to two measures: in the left-hand column, by total citations to papers published on assorted "nano" topics between 1992 and 2002; and, in the right-hand column, by citations per paper, or impact (among institutions that published at least 100 nanotechnology papers over the 11-year period). The tables in this article (both on this page and the following page) list the most-cited nanotechnology researchers of the last decade, and the most-cited journals.

To create these rankings, Science Watch ran a special profile of keywords against papers published between 1992 and 2002 in Thomson ISI-indexed journals. Pertinent variations on "nano-" included "nanocrystal," "nanotube," "nanocomposite," "nanofabrication," etc. (Papers containing "nano" terms from molecular biology or neuroscience, such as "nano-electrospray mass spectrometry" or "nanomolar affinity," were excluded from consideration.)

From the resulting file of more than 65,000 papers, Science Watch identified the big players in nanoscale research. Among institutions judged by total citations, none surpassed the University of California, Berkeley, with more than 15,500 collective citations to 730 nanotechnology papers. In the impact column, Rice University recorded a smaller number of papers over the decade (259) but scored highly on a paper-for-paper basis, with an average of more than 37 cites per paper. Rice and UC Berkeley had the distinction of appearing in the top ten of both the total-citations and impact lists, an achievement also shared by IBM, NEC Corporation, and Harvard.

A few of the institutions listed in the total-citations column are actually umbrella organizations representing multiple, separate facilities. These include the Chinese Academy of Sciences (covering research institutions in the People’s Republic of China), the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), France.

Among researchers, the list of most cited is commandingly topped by Rice University’s Richard E. Smalley (1996 Nobel laureate for his role in the discovery of the fullerene family of carbon molecules), with nearly 8,000 citations to 109 nanotechnology papers published over the last decade. Smalley, in fact, was a principal author on the most-cited paper in this survey, a 1995 report from Science (A. Thess, et al., "Crystalline ropes of metallic carbon nanotubes," 273:483-7, 1995), now cited nearly 1,100 times. Smalley’s coauthors on this blockbuster, who also appear in the most-cited table, include Andreas Thess, Hongjie Dai, Andrew G. Rinzler, Daniel T. Colbert, and John E. Fischer. The second-placed author in the table, A. Paul Alivisatos of UC Berkeley, also accounts for the second-most-cited paper, "Semiconductor clusters, nanocrystals, and quantum dots," (Science, 271:933-7, 1996), with more than 900 citations.

Another of the top-ranked authors, Sumio Iijima of NEC Corporation (with coauthor T. Ichihashi) fielded the survey’s third-most-cited paper: "Single-shell carbon nanotubes of 1-nm diameter," (Nature, 363:603, 1993), with more than 870 citations to date. Iijima’s 1991 blockbuster from Nature (354:56, 1991), reporting the discovery of carbon nanotubes, falls just outside this survey’s 1992-2002 time frame, or the paper’s 3,300+ citations would have vaulted Iijima to the #2 spot among authors.

Charles M. Lieber of Harvard, #5 on the list of most-cited authors, is interviewed in this issue, while Georgia Tech’s Zhong L. Wang (#20) is quoted in the Chemistry Top Ten feature.