 JHU’s Charles L. Bennett on the Hot Microwave Mission
In recent months, the Science Watch Physics Top Ten has been
dominated by observations of the cosmic microwave background radiation.
The results from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP),
a NASA mission launched in 2001, are more highly cited than any recent
work in cosmology. Standing at #1 in the Physics Top Ten is the WMAP
paper on the first year of observations;
see also in this issue the table
in Physics). Amazingly, this 2003 report (D.N. Spergel,
et al., [read
the abstract] from Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series) has
amassed more than 1,000 citations since publication, a tally that has
secured its place in the Physics Top Ten for the last 14 months. Indeed,
in the latest Hot Papers extraction, Spergel et al. collected
more bimonthly citations than any paper in all of science published in
the last two years. At the moment, its only competition among physics’s
hottest papers is #2 in the current Top Ten: another WMAP paper
from the same issue of the journal.
The results of #1, and the companion papers published in the special
issue of the Astrophysical Journal, have really
transformed cosmology. Until the release of these results from WMAP,
plus the data from other complementary experiments and
observations, cosmology
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 The
Hottest Research of 2003-2004
In
its latest annual roundup of recent research, Science Watch
presents the list of authors who, as of late 2004, had published the
greatest number of Hot Papers over the preceding two years. The table lists the (non-review) papers published in 2004 that achieved the highest
citation totals by year’s end (those papers cited more than 35 times).
Atop the list of scientists is the University of Hong Kong’s Malik Peiris,
interviewed last fall in these pages (15[5]: 3-4, September/October
2004), with
nine highly cited reports on severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS. As a
measure of SARS’s continuing influence
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