It doesn`t have a catchy beat, and you can`t dance to it. Nonetheless, science has a hit parade.
It is put out by an obscure bunch of specialists who devote themselves to identifying the most influential scientists, the most powerful research centers, the most significant studies.
They might say, for instance:
”After rocketing to the top of the chart last period, a Japanese report on endothelin-a newly discovered, extremely potent vasoconstrictor peptide-has now fallen to fifth place among the most-cited papers in biology.”
How do they know this?
By examining the footnotes at the end of a scientific article that give credit to the ideas and methods that inspired the research. The part, in other words, that most readers gladly skip.
The footnotes are compiled in enormous data bases such as the Science Citation Index, put out by ISI, the Institute for Scientific Information in Philadelphia. Every year, the institute feeds about 10 million footnotes from 600,000 scientific articles into its computers, where they wait for analysis by people who call themselves bibliometricians. The idea behind their work is simple: The more often a paper is cited in subsequent studies, the more influential it is.
Among their recent conclusions:
– The University of California at Santa Cruz is the top-ranked university for physical sciences in the country, beating out much bigger institutions such as Harvard, the California Institute of Technology and the University of California at Berkeley. Santa Cruz also ranked 12th in biological sciences.
– Scientists who go on to win Nobel Prizes are more productive than average. They publish five to six times as many papers and are cited 30 to 50 times more often than run-of-the-mill researchers.
– As of last August, half of the Top 10 papers in physics were on high-temperature superconductors, demonstrating that the topic, which has faded from public attention, is still sizzling among scientists.
– The impact of NASA research has declined over the last decade, although it did get a boost from the stunning results of the Voyager mission, which flew by Neptune last year.
– The single most influential paper of 1990 was by Bert Vogelstein, a cancer researcher at Johns Hopkins University, who is homing in on the genetic changes responsible for the development of colorectal cancer.
”Probably nobody realized what he was doing except for a few specialists in his field,” says Henry G. Small, research director for an ISI publication called ScienceWatch. Yet this research, he said, has implications for the treatment of these and other cancers.
Political science tool
Among other things, footnotes reveal how often scientists collaborate with colleagues in other countries. In the Middle East, these patterns of cooperation changed dramatically in the last 10 years, according to a recent report by researchers at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands.
The citations, they said, reflected the chill in America`s relationship with Iran and the subsequent strengthening of its ties with Saudi Arabia; an explosion of research in Kuwait, which may have helped trigger jealousy that eventually led Iraq to invade that country; and the concentration of Iraqi research efforts in fields related to chemical, biological and nuclear warfare.
ISI researcher Henk F. Moed said such studies could become a useful tool in political science, a way of understanding complicated events. ”We wanted to provide some new insights into the political crisis in the gulf situation, and I think we did so.”
Efforts to glean useful information from footnotes go back to the 1920s. But they didn`t gather steam until computers became available.
There are now several hundred information scientists in the field worldwide. It has its own journal, Scientometrics, published in Budapest, Hungary, and in the last five years two new publications have brought it more into the public eye: The Scientist, a weekly newspaper for researchers, and ScienceWatch, which goes out to about 500 people in industry, government and academia. Both are put out by ISI, whose director, Eugene Garfield, helped found citation research.
It`s hard to tell what impact, if any, these studies have had.
”For people who need to have a global view of what`s going on in science, I think it`s useful,” says ScienceWatch Editor David A. Pendlebury. ”We try to focus on material that is interesting to the scientific community, but not necessarily the material that`s found on TV or in the newspapers. We say these are the most prominent features in the scientific landscape.”
The results, he said, could help people set research priorities in lean times and, unlike other forms of evaluation, they are fairly objective. Each footnote is like a tiny vote; taken together, they ”reflect what other scientists say is important in the field.”
Aid to recruiting
Officials at the University of California at Santa Cruz say their recent placement at the top of the physical sciences hit parade should improve the university`s reputation, helping it attract high-quality students and faculty and maybe even research funds.
”Many people talk to me and say, `I didn`t know there were any sciences at Santa Cruz,”` said natural sciences dean David S. Kliger. ”But we`re not at all as laid back as our image would suggest.”
In its ranking, which came out in November, ScienceWatch noted that Santa Cruz scientists have done groundbreaking work in cosmology, physics, astrophysics, superconductivity and the study of Supernova 1987a. And it noted that about one-fourth of the universities on its lists of the Top 25 in physical sciences and biology were in California.
The campus has already reaped some intangible benefits, said James Gill, dean of graduate studies and research.
”The clearest thing that happens immediately,” he said, ”is that everyone holds their head up higher, walks brisker and sends copies of it to everyone they know.”
