cience Watch presents here the true citation elite of the last two decades. The table on the next page ranks the 50 most-cited researchers of the last 20 years, based on papers published and cited in Thomson ISI-indexed journals between 1983 and 2002. The table on this page lists the five most-cited papers published during the same period. The rankings are based on data from the Thomson ISI Web of Science.

Topping the list of scientists, with more than 100,000 citations to his published research since 1983, is Bert Vogelstein of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Johns Hopkins University Oncology Center, Baltimore. Vogelstein discussed the p53 tumor-suppressor gene and other topics in these pages back in October 1990. His most-cited paper of the last 20 years is actually featured here among the five blockbusters on page 2: a 1983 methods paper from Analytical Biochemistry on DNA labeling, coauthored with Andrew P. Feinberg, which has now been cited more than 20,000 times. Since 1983, Vogelstein has published 14 papers that have each recorded over 1,000 citations.

In addition to the interview with Vogelstein, Science Watch has been fortunate to present conversations with several other of the highly cited researchers here: (in chronological order) Robert Tjian (December 1990), Michael J. Berridge (September 1991), Peter H. Seeburg (February/March 1992), Erkki Ruoslahti (April 1992): Robert A. Weinberg (August 1992), Ronald M. Evans (December 1992), Axel Ullrich (March 1993), Pierre Chambon (February 1994), Joseph Schlessinger (May 1994), Tony Hunter (November/December 1994), Walter C. Willett (June 1995), Anthony S. Fauci (May/June 1996), Ad Bax (January/February 1998), Timothy A. Springer (March/April 1998), Michael Karin (March/April 1999), and John C. Reed (May/June 2000).
Note, all of the above and others of the 50 most-cited researchers of the last 20 years are linked to their interviews & comments from Science Watch online edition, in-cites and ESI Special Topics on the following page.

The list also includes three Nobel laureates (so far): David Baltimore, Michael S. Brown, and Joseph L. Goldstein.

Although this survey scrutinized the citation records of researchers from all fields, the final list—as readers will likely have noted by now—consists entirely of names from life-science or biomedical fields. Compared to the physical sciences, the life sciences always seem to carry the advantage in measures of citations, presumably as a result of comparatively more scientists, more experiments, and more papers—with most of those papers containing longer lists of references to be tabulated. (For the record, the most-cited physical scientist of this time period is theoretical physicist Edward Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, with nearly 33,000 citations.) Also evident in this survey is the wide application (and obvious citation clout) of methods papers, as all five of the reports listed here fall into that category.

Two of the researchers on the list, Piotr Chomczynski and Nicoletta Sacchi, collaborated on what is the most-cited paper of this 20-year period (#1 in the accompanying table): a 1987 report on a method of isolating RNA, now cited nearly 50,000 times

Like the Feinberg/Vogelstein paper discussed above, the Chomczynski/Sacchi report was published in Analytical Biochemistry, giving that journal the two most-cited papers published since 1983. The third most-cited paper, on the BLAST program ("basic local alignment search tool") for gene-sequence identification, was discussed by first author Stephen F. Altschul in the July/August 2000 Science Watch. Altschul has since worked on refinements of the BLAST program. David J. Lipman, the originator of BLAST and senior author on the Altschul et al. paper, wound up just outside the group of top 50 researchers, with nearly 36,000 total citations.

Incidentally, more information on the scientists listed here, and on upwards of 4.000 other top-cited researchers in 21 fields, can be found at www.isihighlycited.com.