Thought leaders in the unthinkable
Thomson Reuters
June 2009
Science Watch examines highly cited research on bioterrorism over the last decade.
Science Watch's content usually reflects humankind's higher aspirations to advance knowledge and improve life, but its recent analysis represents the opposite impulse: bioterrorism. The study extracted data based on a special list of pertinent keywords, revealing over 12,000 bioterrorism-related papers published in Thomson Reuters-indexed journals between 1999 and 2008. From this set of papers, Science Watch identified the most-cited institutions, authors, and journals.
Most cited paper
The most-cited paper in this collection dates from 2001 and reports the genome sequence of Yersinia pestis, the causative agent of plague (S. Baker, et al., Nature, 413: 523-7, 2001; now cited nearly 500 times). The next-most-cited paper appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine with the succinct title "Anthrax" (T.C. Dixon, et al., 341: 815-26, 1999)—two years before the incidents in late 2001 in which anthrax-tainted mail killed five people in the US; this paper has now been cited more than 400 times.
Most cited author
Arthur M. Friedlander, of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases, takes first place amongst the highly cited authors. Among many other papers, Friedlander contributed to the reports from the Working Group on Civilian Biodefense (a US group that produced papers examining the potential bio-weapon implications of smallpox, anthrax, tularemia, plague, botulinum toxin, and hemorrhagic fever).
Most cited institution
Based on total numbers of citations, the U.S. Army heads the list of most cited institutions. However by the measure of citations per paper, The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) scores highest, thanks in part to its participation in a 2002 report on the sequence of Bacillus anthracis Ames—a strain that causes inhalational anthrax—and its comparison to closely related bacteria. Friedlander also contributed to this report, as did some of the other authors featured here: Timothy D. Read, Philip C. Hanna, and TIGR's then-president, Claire M. Fraser-Liggett.
See the complete Science Watch report and data tables
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