The Best of Biology in the 1990's

The Best of Biology in the 1990's

The legacies of two famed industrialists—Howard Hughes and Sir Henry Wellcome—stand out strongly in a new Science Watch survey of high-impact biomedical research in the 1990s. Scientists employed by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) have produced the greatest number of highly cited biology papers in this decade so far, resulting in the highest number of total citations of any organization (see table above). Meanwhile, researchers at the Wellcome Research Labs in Beckenham, U.K. (which, since 1995, has been part of the combined pharmaceutical firm of Glaxo Wellcome) fielded far fewer high-impact reports but made each paper count, posting the highest number of citations per high-impact paper.

To identify the most-cited biology research of the decade, Science Watch combed the ISI database for life-sciences papers published between 1990 and 1996 that were each cited at least 300 times by the end of 1996. From the resulting group of 1,381 reports, Science Watch identified the most-cited institutions and authors. Institutions that produced at least 10 of the highly cited reports appear above, ranked both by total citations and citations per paper. Page 2 features a list of the individual researchers who each contributed at least seven of the high-impact papers. [Click here to view "Authors of High Impact Papers in Biomedicine, 1990-96,"]

By the measure of total citations, HHMI clearly showed its dominance in the decade's biomedical research, logging over 90,000 citations to its 194 hot papers. Only Harvard University came close, posting 128 high-impact papers that collectively attracted over 60,000 citations. As an indicator of gross influence, the total-citations measure tends to favor large institutions that produce many papers. It is therefore not surprising that along with HHMI and Harvard, the institutions that fielded the largest number of high-impact papers also landed at the top of the total-citations ranking, including the NCI (65 papers), UCSF (59 papers) and Johns Hopkins University (56 papers).
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Rank	Institution	Citations 1990-96
1	Howard Hughes Medical Institute	91,269
2	Harvard University	60,532
3	Johns Hopkins University	35,546
4	NCI	32,953
5	Univ. Calif., San Francisco	26,014
6	MIT	23,885
7	Massachusetts General Hospital	19,500
8	Univ. Calif., San Diego	17,988
9	Dana Farber Cancer Institute	16,290
10	University of Washington	16,275
11	Stanford University	16,258
12	Brigham & Women's Hospital	15,915
13	Washington University	14,616
14	Salk Institute	14,340
15	Duke University	13,438
16	Imperial Cancer Research Fund	13,418
17	Baylor College of Medicine	13,402
18	Yale University	12,951
19	New York University	11,090
20	Whitehead Institute	10,906
21	Fred Hutchinson Cancer Res. Ctr.	10,523
22	Univ. Calif., Los Angeles	10,343
23	Vanderbilt University	9,732
24	Memorial Sloan Kettering Can. Ctr.	9,554
25	UT Southwest Medical Center	9,412

Rank	Institution	Citations 1990-96
1	Wellcome Research Labs	735.6
2	Johns Hopkins University	634.8
3	Kyoto University	587.1
4	University of Cambridge	568.6
5	University of Alabama	548.7
6	Dana Farber Cancer Institute	543.0
7	MIT	530.8
8	Tufts University	529.9
9	University of Oxford	528.1
10	UT Southwest Medical Center	522.9
11	Institut Pasteur	508.3
12	University of Toronto	508.0
13	NCI	507.0
14	New York University	504.1
15	Washington University	504.0
16	Cornell University	503.2
17	University of North Carolina	500.0
18	Yale University	498.1
19	Salk Institute	494.5
20	University of Colorado	491.6
21	Children's Hospital Med. Ctr.	490.0
22	Cetus Corporation	488.0
23	Vanderbilt University	486.6
24	Osaka University	485.9
25	Duke University	479.9

Wellcome Research Labs, on the other hand, produced only 12 papers that were each cited 300 or more times by 1996. Among these, however, were several highly cited reports by Salvador Moncada (now at University College London) and colleagues on the physiology and pharmacology of nitric oxide. One such paper, published in Pharmacological Reviews in 1991, received 3,889 citations by the end of 1996 (see S. Moncada et al., Pharm. Rev., 43[2]:109-42, 1991). Only one biomedical paper published in the 90s received more citations: a report by a team representing the National Library of Medicine, Pennsylvania State University, and the University of Arizona. The paper describes the Basic Local Alignment Search Tool, a family of programs used in automated gene-sequencing (see S.F. Altschul, et al., J. Molec. Biol., 215[3]:403-10, 1990). This paper has now been cited over 4,100 times.

The other top-cited papers include "Adhesion receptors of the immune system," a review by Timothy A. Springer, Harvard University, which has received over 3,400 citations (see Nature, 346[6283]:425-34, 1990); "Integrins: Versatility, modulation, and signaling in cell adhesion," by Richard O. Hynes of HHMI and MIT, cited 2,642 times (see Cell, 69[1]:11-25, 1992); and "Signal transduction by receptors with tyrosine kinase activity," by Axel Ullrich of the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry, Martinsried, Germany, and Joseph Schlessinger of the New York University Medical Center (see Cell, 61[2]:203-12, 1990), cited 2,615 times.

Three journals accounted for over half of the 1,381 high-impact papers. Cell and Nature published 249 papers each, while 230 appeared in Science. Rounding out the top five journals in terms of total papers, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA published 68 papers, and the New England Journal of Medicine fielded 60.

Not surprisingly, the 24 names above represent some of the decade's most active areas of research. Investigations of p53 and other tumor-suppressor genes (Vogelstein, Kinzler, Hamilton, Lane, Weinberg), nitric oxide (Moncada, Snyder, Bredt), and varied aspects of cell signaling and cellular regulation (Schlessinger, Hunter, Karin, Pawson, McCormick, several others) are just a few examples. Click here to view "Authors of High Impact Papers in Biomedicine, 1990-96."