 Oxford’s Rory Collins on the Merits of Meta-Analysis
Over the past 20 years, two phenomena have dominated the field of
clinical epidemiology: the rise of large-scale trials with thousands or
tens of thousands of subjects, and the simultaneous rise of the
meta-analysis, in which the data of all relevant trials or prospective
studies are pooled together and analyzed as one. Together, the two
trends have resulted in unprecedented advances in our ability to
determine the risks and benefits of modern medical therapies, and have
loosed a flood of information on the progress of these therapies, from
speculative hypothesis to applications in the clinic.
At the very heart of this advance has been the Oxford University
Clinical Trial Service Unit (CTSU), headed by Richard Peto and Rory
Collins. While both researchers have accrued citation totals in the last
decade that place them among the top 50 of the 13,000+ names in the ISI
Essential Science Indicators
Web Product listing for clinical medicine, their work
in the last two years
is exerting particular impact at present. In this
publication’s latest annual roundup of the world’s hottest
scientists (Science Watch 15[2]: 1-2, March/April
2004), Peto
scored with six recent Hot Papers, and Collins, even more impressively,
wound up in the top tier with eight highly cited reports published since
late 2001. These include the results of the Medical Research
Council/British Heart Foundation Heart Protection Study,
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 Crowd
Control? Multiauthor Papers Appear to Level Off in Recent
Years.
 fter
rising steeply through most of the 1990s, the number of papers with multiple
authors—particularly with 50 or more coauthors—appears to have leveled off
in recent years, according to a new Science Watch analysis. This report follows up on a previous study that tracked
multiauthor papers published between 1981 and 1994 (see Science Watch,
6[4]: 1-2, April 1995)...
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