Genetics and Astronomy: Research that Moved the Meter in 2011

A new analysis ranking the most influential scientific researchers and research papers of the year has been published.

Thomson Reuters’ annual “Hottest Research” report details the research papers published in 2011 that were referenced in the greatest number of other publications. The list of influential researchers relied on papers published from 2010-2011.

Citations by other researchers are not a perfect measure of the quality of scientific information in a paper, but the listed papers and researchers are certainly important in their various fields. In all, Thomson Reuters identified 38 papers that were cited at least 40 times in 2011 and 15 researchers with 10 or more papers highly cited over the last two years.

Ten of those 38 papers were published in one scientific journal, Nature. The New England Journal of Medicine had 8. Notably, the top three papers were all published in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series.

The top paper, which interpreted the findings from a NASA spacecraft that measured cosmic microwave background radiation -- a measure of the distribution of the first light released in the universe -- was published in February 2011 and in the same calendar year, was cited 564 times.

The report credits genetics as the hottest field of study, as seven of the 15 hottest individual researchers work on related topics.