Salk, UCSD Among Top 10 Producers of ‘Hot’ Research
Two San Diego research institutions are among the top 10 research facilities worldwide, based on the number of “hot” biomedical research papers published by their faculties in the last year, a newspaper for science professionals has found.
In the No. 2 spot, the Salk Institute in La Jolla ranked ahead of all universities and private research institutes worldwide. UC San Diego was 10th on the list.
Published in the July 23 edition of The Scientist, the list was compiled by looking at how many times scientific papers were cited by other researchers during the first 18 months after their publication. The higher the number of citations, the more important and influential a paper can be considered, the method assumes.
However, because of space limitations, The Scientist’s list does not include all papers that would meet this criterion, it says.
Salk scientists authored four of 81 papers, or 4.9%, of those cited most often, The Scientist reported. That was second only to the National Institutes of Health, at 5.2%.
But Salk officials note that NIH is a vastly better-funded institution, at about $800 million a year, contrasted with the $34-million research budget at Salk.
“This ranking reflects the considerable talent of our faculty members and their ability to contribute in substantial ways to the progress of science,” said Renato Dulbecco, president of Salk. “We are a very small institution compared to most of those on the list, so our contribution to the work of other members of the scientific community is disproportionately large.”
Salk research that gained the institution this recognition was led by faculty members Inder Verma, Marc Montminy and Tony Hunter. Other researchers involved at Salk were Anne Murray Quinn, K. K. Yamamoto, Steven Hanks, Gustavo Gonzalez, Paolo Sassone-Corse, John Sisson, Mark Kamps and William Lamph.
Other institutions on the list, in order, were Stanford University, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, the National Center for Scientific Research in France, UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco (tied for eighth place), Johns Hopkins University and Cambridge University (tied for ninth), and UCSD.
UCSD faculty members authored three of the 81 papers, or 2.2%. No information was available Thursday on who the authors were.
The Scientist’s list was its second in the last year to note the scientific prominence of San Diego’s research establishment.
In May, the newspaper placed three San Diego researchers--one from UCSD and two from Salk--on its list of “Nine for the 1990s,” the scientists under age 45 whose work was most cited by others from 1981 to 1988.
They were Flossie Wong-Staal of UCSD, who has done key work characterizing the AIDS virus; Ronald M. Evans, who studies hormones’ influences in the body; and Inder Verma, who studies cancer-causing genes and mechanisms that might be used for gene therapy. Evans and Verma, in addition to their work at Salk, are adjunct professors at UCSD.
