It was a year in which science made headlines-when a lamb named Dolly came on like a lion, and the Pathfinder mission bounced to a perfect Martian landing. And, as always, Science Watch was watching. Here is the annual citation roundup for 1997: those scientists who, at year's end, could boast the greatest number of highly cited papers published during the preceding two years, according to the latest update of ISI's Hot Papers Database. The following page features the reports (excluding reviews) published in 1997 that had garnered the most citations by December. Unlike in previous years, the 1997 ranking of hot scientists proved to be an egalitarian affair. Following its custom of identifying scientists who have published at least five highly cited papers over the last two years, Science Watch found that only one researcher leapt out from the pack-by a grand total of one paper. Ronald M. Evans, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator at the Salk Institute, La Jolla, California, grabs the top spot with six papers on nuclear hormone receptors and their action in gene activation and other cellular responses. Evans was featured in last fall's survey of "high-impact" authors in biomedicine during the 1990s (see Science Watch, 8[5]:1-2, September/October 1997). J. Craig Venter of The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR), in Rockville, Maryland, heads the sizable group of runner-ups (the order of names in the second-place tier is determined by average cites per paper for each author's five hot reports). Venter, with TIGR colleague Mark D. Adams, scored with five genome maps published over the last two years. Another genomist, Eric S. Lander of the Whitehead/MIT Center for Genome Research, Cambridge, Massachusetts, makes a repeat appearance from 1996-the only holdover, in fact, from last year's listing. Recent research into the action of cofactors in HIV infection brings several names to the list, including Marc Parmentier of the Free University of Brussels, Belgium. One of the reports coauthored by Parmentier is now ranked seventh in the Biology Top Ten (see page 8 of this issue); one of Parmentier's collaborators on that report and on two other hot papers is Robert W. Doms of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Doms also contributed to two additional high-impact reports on HIV coreceptors. On one of these papers, discussing fusin in HIV-2 infection, Doms's coauthors included another member of this select group: Nathaniel R. Landau of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center. Among Landau's four other hot reports is the Deng et al. paper from Cell that is currently ranked #3 in biology. Joseph Sodroski and Hyeryun Choe of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Harvard Medical School, and their collaborators, published five highly cited reports on chemokine receptors in HIV infection, including the Nature paper by He et al. that ranks among 1997's most cited. Rounding out the hot authors are Peter H. Krammer of the German Cancer Research Center, Heidelberg, Germany, who contributed to five hot reports on the FLICE protein and other aspects of programmed cell death. Two other HHMI researchers, Joan Massagué and Stanley J. Korsmeyer-both of whom ranked among the highest-impact biomedical authors of the 1990s, also appear here. Isa K. Mushahwar and A. Scott Muerhoff, colleagues at Abbott Laboratories in North Chicago, Illinois, fielded five high-impact reports on the hepatitis GB virus C. Jerry W. Shay, of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, contributed to reports on the activity of telomerase in normal and cancerous cells. And John C. Reed, of the Burnham Institute, La Jolla, California, was coauthor of five reports on cell death. And, for the record, Dolly the sheep made the top ten for the year (#10), by a nose. View The Red Hot Research Papers of 1997.
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