The 1987 Life-Sciences Articles Most Cited in 1987 and 1988

This essay continues a series begun over a decade ago: our armual study of the mostcited papers in the life sciences. 1-11In this installment, Bernard Dixon, former editor of New Scientist and currently contributing editor to Biotechnology, examines the most-cited papers published in 1987, listed in the Bibliography at the end of this essay. Dixon has contributed previously to these pages—most recently last year, when he reviewed the 102 most-cited life-sciences papers from the 1945-1954 Science Citation Indexm cumulation. 12 Although, as in past studies, we evaluate and rank these papers based on two years’ worth of citations (1987 and 1988, in this case), we have included data on 1989 citations in the Bibliography. Thus, it is possible to gauge the continuing impact of these 1987 papers. As Dixon observes, this analysis demons~ates how the metheds and concepts of molecular biology have come to pervade the life sciences as a whole. Also of note is the comparatively modest showing by methods papers. Such papers, as we’ve noted previously, are often heavily represented in lists of most-cited papers. Among the papers identified for this study, those discussing techniques were confined to a relative few—which is not to say that their influence wasn’t far-reaching. Dixon also discusses instances where a high level of citations in the two years following publication seemed to denote repudiation, rather than acceptance, of initial findings, as researchers sought to reiine and improve investigation and theory. This occurred with papers discussing Alzheimer’s disease, cystic fibrosis, and manic-depressive illness. Such patterns, as Dixon concludes, illuminate the “social activity” at the heart of the scientific process.