🚀 go-pugleaf

crb7q@kelvin.seas.Virginia.EDU (Cameron Randale Bass) writes:
>     It is interesting to speculate that without the discovery of high-Tc
>     superconductivity, all of the 'Top 10' would be biology.  Of course,
>     judging by the inhuman publication rates of certain people in the 
>     medical community, at the level of several hundred publications a year
>     some could be wholly self referential (humor inferred).

The top 10 are generally biologists; or medical researchers (who tend
to be worse about spewing out enormous numbers of self-citing papers,
it seems.)  A year or so ago a different survey of highly cited papers,
including theory, had nine biology researchers and Ed Witten as the Top
10 citees.  Witten's appearance was noted as unusual since they are
almost always biologists.

Someone at the Institute for Scientific Information (publishers of SCI)
once told me that the annual appearance of the Top 10 list is awaited
nervously by the people who tend to be on it and that some take falling 
off it very hard (concomitant loss of prestige, money,etc).  Whatever one 
may say about the pressure to publish and reliance on stupid counts of
total papers published in physics, it's worse in medical research.

- Ben
-----[new quote]
"When J. Edgar Hoover gives you a requirement for complete
[telecommunications] surveillance of all Quakers in the United States,
when Richard M. Nixon is a Quaker and he's the President of the United
States, it gets pretty funny."  - Frank Raven, retired NSA official