Andy, Although Ron Evans did not get the Nobel Prize in Medicine this year, today's NY Times has an article on citations. It also gives some info on the most cited authors and the list is relatively short. Of interest is the most popular field, which is cell signalling. Five of the top 10 scientists (based on citation frequency) are working on cell signalling, and the #2 author in this subgroup is LGND Scientific Advisory Board Chair and exclusive consultant, Ron Evans:
October 7, 1997
No Nobel Prize This Year? Try Footnote
Counting
By NICHOLAS WADE
October is nail-biting season for many senior scientists who hope to
be awoken by an early morning call from Stockholm bearing news
of their sudden celebrity.
For many who deserve it, the call from the Nobel committee never
comes. Though the Nobel Prizes for science are considerably less
arbitrary than many other kinds of awards, they can be influenced by
factors other than merit. The prizes cover only certain scientific subjects,
allowing astronomers and geologists a shot only if they are counted as
physicists.
The Swedish award committees are also cautious to a degree, having
been burned in the past by hailing hot discoveries that later turned out to
be wrong. To insure against error, they like to let discoveries ripen,
sometimes for decades, even though Alfred Nobel in his will decreed the
prizes should go for work done "during the preceding year." Thus Peyton
Rous, who discovered that viruses could cause cancer, had to wait 55
years for his award.
The prize committee has been more adventurous than usual this year in
giving the award to Stanley B. Prusiner, since the theory of prions he
developed has gained acceptance only recently.
There is another, more up-to-date way of recognizing scientific
pre-eminence. It carries no cash. It has none of the cachet of the Nobel
Prize, perhaps because it does not depend on the mystique of some far
away committee. It is down to earth and very democratic. It is called
citation analysis or, less grandly, footnote counting.
The method works because of the inflexible etiquette in scientific
publishing that authors should refer to all previous findings on which their
own work is based. One reason that articles in scientific journals are
burdened with a long list of footnotes is that authors know to expect
angry e-mail from anyone who feels unjustly neglected. Even so, the
majority of published scientific articles are cited very little or never and
vanish leaving hardly a trace in the annals of scientific progress.
Because of this emphasis on diligent citation, the impact of a scientific
paper can be assessed by counting the number of times it is footnoted by
other authors. The method is not perfect. Commit an egregious blunder
and your paper will get plenty of footnotes.
Articles in small fields have less chance of being cited than those in larger
fields. But over all, citation analysis works. Lists of highly cited papers sift
out those that report either seminal discoveries or widely used methods.
Also, citation analysis is perfectly objective. Unlike the members of prize
committees, the method has no favors or grudges to repay, and is not
swayed by a feeling that it is this or that field's turn to be honored. It
represents simply the votes of working scientists on the papers that are
important to them.
The Institute for Scientific Information, a Philadelphia company that
performs the chore of counting footnotes in the world's scientific
literature, recently issued a list of the authors of the most highly cited
papers in biology and medicine between 1990 and 1996. To make the
cut, an author needed seven papers, each with at least 300 citations
during this period. Just 24 made the honor roll.
Head and shoulders above the rest is Dr. Bert Vogelstein of Johns
Hopkins University, with 22 high-impact papers, cited 773 times on
average. Vogelstein is a leading expert on agents called tumor
suppressors that protect cells against cancerous growth. He has
unraveled the sequence of genetic errors accumulated by colon cells as
they grow into cancers. The second most cited author, Dr. Kenneth W.
Kinzler, has been a partner of Vogelstein's in many of his papers.
Dr. Joseph Schlessinger of New York University is the third most cited
author. He works in the hot field of cell signaling, the field of how cells
process messages, as do several other scientists on the list, including
Ronald M. Evans of the Salk Institute (No. 7); Frank McCormick of the
University of California, San Francisco (No. 8); Michael Karin of the
University of California, San Diego (No. 9) and Tony Pawson of Mount
Sinai Hospital in Toronto (No. 10).
Curiously, none of the 24 authors on the Institute for Scientific
Information list has been awarded the Nobel Prize except for David
Baltimore of the California Institute of Technology (No. 5), who received
it for work done in the 1970s. David A. Pendlebury, an analyst at ISI,
suggested that the Nobel Prize committees had not yet caught up with
work done in the 1990-1996 period. Lists of highly cited authors from
earlier periods include many Nobel Prize-winners, he said.
It is customary for scientists awarded the Nobel Prize to profess
astonishment, even if they have lobbied for it for years. But citation is an
open process and scientists have a good idea how widely their papers are
noticed.
Schlessinger said he was "very happy" to see his papers and those of
others in the cell signaling field ranked highly in the ISI list. "You always
like to be ranked; it's like tennis players," he said. "We are elected by
people reading our papers and saying they are important."
Several prize-giving institutions vie with the Nobel Prize in giving away
comparable sums of money. But none have gained similar esteem,
perhaps because it is hard to compete with the Nobel Prize's backlist,
perhaps because their selection processes are not obviously better.
Maybe the next billionaire to endow an eponymous prize should just take
the current ISI list and hand out medals to the top 10.
No one could impute politics or favoritism to the crowning of the footnote
laureates. |
