The Finest in Physical Sciences

The Finest in Physical Sciences

The former AT&T Bell Laboratories and the University of Cambridge emerge as the top performers in a new Science Watch survey of physical sciences research in the 1990s. The Murray Hill, New Jersey, facility—now part of Lucent Technologies and known officially as Bell Labs Innovations— produced the greatest number of "high- impact" papers in the physical sciences over the last seven years. As indicated in the table above, these papers collectively earned the highest number of total citations of any organization. The University of Cambridge, meanwhile, recorded the highest citations-per-paper score for its 22 high-impact papers.

To complement the report on biomedical research that appeared in the previous issue (see Science Watch, 8[5]:1-2, September/ October 1997), Science Watch searched the ISI database for physical sciences papers published between 1990 and 1996 that were each cited at least 150 times through June 1997. From the resulting file of 944 high-impact papers, Science Watch ranked institutions by total citations and citations per paper (above). On the next page, [Click here to view "Highly Cited Authors in the Physical Sciences, 1990-96,"] individual researchers are ranked according to the number of high-impact papers that each published (among those who contributed at least five such papers).

As might be expected, many of the high-impact researchers on the list were immersed in one of the hottest topics of the decade: fullerenes. In fact, the top four names represent three separate teams that published high-impact reports describing various properties of the spherical carbon molecules, including groups based in the early 1990s primarily at UCLA-UCSB (Diederich, Whetten, Rubin, Alvarez, Wudl, Anz), IBM's Almaden Research Center (Bethune, Meijer, de Vries, Johnson), and the former AT&T Bell Labs (Haddon, Murphy, Rosseinsky). Also on the list is fullerene co-discoverer and Nobel laureate Sir Harold W. Kroto, who, with University of Sussex colleague Jonathan P. Hare, published five of these red-hot research reports. [Continued below chart ]

Rank	Institution	Citations 1990-97
1	AT&T Bell Labs (Lucent)	18,840
2	IBM Corp.	13,020
3	University of Cambridge	9,131
4	Univ. Calif., Santa Barbara	7,926
5	Princeton University	7,698
6	MIT	7,682
7	Univ. Calif., Los Angeles	7,447
8	Argonne National Lab	7,386
9	University of Illinois	6,567
10	Harvard University	6,259
11	NASA	5,248
12	Yale University	4,942
13	Los Alamos National Lab	4,599
14	Stanford University	4,442
15	Caltech	4,433
16	Univ. Calif., San Diego	4,370
17	Univ. Calif., Berkeley	3,968
18	Columbia University	3,935
19	University of Minnesota	3,694
20	Swiss Federal Inst. of Technology	3,654
21	University of Toronto	3,608
22	Lawrence Berkeley Lab	3,397
23	University of Tokyo	3,389
24	University of Pennsylvania	3,162
25	NEC Corp., Ltd.	3,132

Rank	Institution	Citations 1990-97
1	University of Cambridge	415.1
2	NEC Corp., Ltd.	348.0
3	Lawrence Berkeley Lab	308.8
4	Columbia University	302.7
5	University of Sussex	298.0
6	Scripps Research Institute	297.3
7	U.S. Navy	291.7
8	NASA	291.6
9	AT&T Bell Labs (Lucent)	281.2
10	Institute for Advanced Study	278.9
11	Carnegie Mellon University	278.7
12	Caltech	277.1
13	Univ. Calif., Los Angeles	275.8
14	Yale University	274.6
15	Brookhaven National Lab	273.7
16	Rutgers University	273.6
17	Princeton University	265.5
18	Univ. Calif., Berkeley	264.5
19	University of Minnesota	263.9
20	Argonne National Lab	263.8
21	Swiss Federal Inst. of Technology	261.0
22	Rice University	258.3
23	University of Toronto	257.7
24	Univ. Calif., Santa Barbara	255.7
25	Fermilab	255.2

Although fullerene research did not account for the most-cited of this survey's 944 papers, it came close. With their 1990 report "Solid C₆₀: A new form of carbon," the team led by Donald R. Huffman, University of Arizona, and Wolfgang Kratschmer, Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics, Heidelberg, Germany, won the race to publish the first method for mass-producing C₆₀ (see W. Kratschmer, et al., Nature, 347:354-8, 1990). This paper has now been cited 2,755 times. Only two physical sciences papers published since 1990 have earned more citations: a report by George M. Sheldrick of the University of Göttingen, Germany, on the SHELX-90 computer program for determining crystal structures (see Acta Cryst. A, 46:467-73, 1990), now cited 2,870 times; and "MOLSCRIPT: A program to produce both detailed and schematic plots of protein structures," by Per Kraulis of Uppsal University, Sweden. (see J. Appl. Cryst., 24:946-50,1991). This paper has received 2,785 citations.

Along with fullerenes, another of the decade's hot topics—superconductivity—is well represented in the table of researchers (Batlogg, Vinokur, Veal, Paulikas, Pines, and Maple).

Physical Review Letters published the greatest number of high-impact papers in this survey: 149 of 944 papers. Nature was next, with 71, followed by Physical Review B (64 papers), Journal of the American Chemical Society and Science (55 each), and Chemical Reviews (44). Click here to view "Highly Cited Authors in the Physical Sciences, 1990-96."