Viewed through another lens, however, the survey suggests that the real stars are smaller institutes that produced the year's hottest papers.
He published one of the hottest papers on cancer research, which may lead to completely new treatments, when he linked a transcription factor (TCF, involved in the creation of T-lymphocytes) with a tumor suppressor protein APC (see, e.g. Science, 21 March 1997, p. 1784 [Subscription/AAAS membership required]).
A somewhat obscure study on statistical methods published in 2009 by medical statistician Ying Lu at Stanford University, California in a specialty journal on clinical trials, was downloaded 2000 times in early August, making it the hottest paper among Stanford University's 5439 registered users.
One of Dr. Reed's "hot papers" was criticized in a letter to Science magazine this year.
Dr. Reed keeps framed copies of his No. 1 "hot papers" rating, but he plays down the ranking game.
"Hot papers" are research papers that garner many more citations by other scientists than an average paper does, said Christopher King, the editor of Science Watch.
For two years running, Dr. Reed, the scientific director of the Burnham Institute, a cancer research center here, has been No. 1 on a list of scientists ranked by the number of "hot papers" they have published.
In his meetings with colleagues, a frequent question posed by Dr. Reed is: "What still needs to happen to put out a paper on this?" In each of the last two years, Dr. Reed placed first in the Science Watch ranking with nine "hot papers" on programmed cell death.
Other hot papers of the '90s are on superconductivity, nuclear magnetic resonance, and computer programs for determining molecular structures.
Apoptosis, or programmed cell death, was the dominant theme among the top 10 hot papers for 1997, beating out even Dolly, the cloned lamb, in the citation count.
LONDON--=The Universities of Oxford and Cambridge still have gold-plated reputations in British science, but they do not have a monopoly on the hot papers, according to figures to be published in January by the Philadelphia-based ISItISIte for ScISItISIc ISIormatISI (ISI).
