page 42
Lab Times
Ranking
2-2011
Publication
Publication Analysis
Analysis 1998-2009
1998-2009
Respiratory System
England dominates European respiratory system research more clearly than most other biomedical disciplines.
Most-cited topics are asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and pulmonary hypertension.
I
t’s not difficult to guess that research into the respiratory system is dominated by disease topics. This fact, however, immediately turns it into a rather broad field, the reason being that
lung and airway diseases are probably more diverse than the diseases of any other human organ system. One of the consequences, therefore, is that apart from the “obvious” fields of pneumology, pulmology and internal medicine, quite a variety of other
medical fields are also attracted to lung research.
The most obvious example, of course, is lung cancer, which
certainly is a major research topic for many oncologists and pathologists. This fact, however, is actually nothing unusual since
the same is true for more or less every organ system that can be
affected by tumour development.
In contrast, more specific variety is introduced to the field by
two other pre-dominating airway diseases: asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Among other factors
(smoking, for example), one of the main underlying reasons for
both of those malfunctions is the fact that the respiratory system
interacts with our environment in a much more direct manner
than the majority of other organs. Therefore, in the cases of asthma and COPD, considerable numbers of researchers from epidemiology and public health, immunology and allergology, environmental and occupational medicine, social medicine and paediatrics also enter the “respiratory field”.
One system, much input
However, this is still not the end of the line. So far, we still
haven’t spoken about lung and airway infections, such as tuberculosis, which means we should also keep our eyes peeled for microbiologists, infectiologists and, once again, immunologists. And, of
course, all the physiologists, biochemists, cell and molecular biologists, etc. who perform basic research into the function of the
respiratory system also remain to be mentioned.
So, when it comes to a publication analysis of European respiratory research – shouldn’t it be a bit like comparing apples
with oranges given this remarkable variety of disciplines involved? Wait and see!
First of all, one “technical” point. Many of the “top papers” on
respiratory research are, indeed, published in multidisciplinary
journals like Nature, Science or The Lancet. Nevertheless, we had
to restrict a certain part of the analysis to the 43 expert journals
listed in the subject category “Respiratory System” of Thomson
Reuter’s database Web of Science, which was used for this analysis. The reason is that Web of Science doesn’t provide any sufficiently reliable tools to automatically extract relevant respiratory
system articles from those multidisciplinary journals. Of course,
as a result, some of the most prominent papers in the field have
been omitted from the performance analysis of individual countries (see tables p. 37). Despite this limitation, however, we believe that a survey, restricted to the specialist journals only, still
provides sufficiently valid indicators for the countries’ overall productivity in respiratory system research. On the contrary,
rankings of the most-cited researchers and papers (see tables, p.
38) could be analysed from publications in all journals.
Not many surprises
Given this directive, let’s have a look at how the publication
performance in respiratory research during the period 1998-2009
is distributed among the individual European countries. The fact
that England emerges as the “winner” in terms of number of articles and overall citations isn’t really unexpected. What is somewhat of a surprise, however, is just how wide the gap is to followers, Germany and France. Both those countries each achieved
barely 55% of England’s article count; and even both together
collected a mere handful more citations than their English colleagues.
Ranking
Otherwise, the list hardly reveals any further surprises. In
terms of overall citations, the individual countries more or less
appear at their “usual” positions when compared to other biomedical disciplines. And when it comes to average citation rates,
it’s yet again the Nordic countries that climb to the top, headed
by Sweden with 18.4 citations per article, followed by Denmark
with 17.0 and Finland with 16.0. Perhaps a small surprise in this
respect might be that, among the large European research nations, it was Germany that this time achieved the highest average
citation rate with 12.8 citations per article.
And beyond the European borders? When compared to their
US colleagues, European publications in the expert journals for
respiratory system research altogether collected only marginally more citations (597,000 vs. 584,000). The US-based authors,
however, actually needed a considerably lower total number of
publications to achieve that “tie” in citation frequency.
Furthermore, Canada, in particular, turned out to be a strong
performer in respiratory system research: only slightly fewer publications in total when compared to Germany and France, but
clearly more citations in total – thanks to the comparatively high
average rate of 16 citations per article.
Interestingly, the predominance of England in European respiratory system research is not so clearly reflected by the lists of
the most-cited papers and authors. Of the five most-cited papers
with European correspondence addresses, numbers one and four
come from England, whereas numbers two and three are from
Germany and number five from France. In terms of topics, numbers one and two are about asthma, number four about chronic
obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and numbers three and
five are clinical drug studies on the therapy of pulmonary hypertension.
2-2011
.
Lab Times
page 43
Europe...
Country
Citations
Articles
Cit./Art.
1. England
2. Germany
3. France
4. Italy
5. Netherlands
6. Spain
7. Sweden
8. Switzerland
9. Belgium
10. Scotland
11. Denmark
12. Finland
13. Austria
14. Turkey
15. Greece
16. Norway
17. Israel
18. Ireland
19. Poland
20. Wales
168,728
94,001
80,801
70,089
57,856
45,960
38,269
33,093
32,634
20,715
17,104
12,702
11,162
11,049
9,857
9,352
9,243
8,596
8,412
5,313
13,642
7,362
7,473
6,057
3,662
3,904
2,083
2,423
2,304
1,570
1,006
796
1,029
1,719
1,195
658
942
877
722
448
12.4
12.8
10.8
11.6
15.8
11.8
18.4
13.7
14.2
13.2
17.0
16.0
10.9
6.4
8.3
14.2
9.8
9.8
11.7
11.9
Oranges in the apple basket?
A similar picture, at first view, emerges when looking at the
30 most-cited authors of European respiratory research. Nine researchers from England made it into this “Top 30” but also nine
from Germany (and three from France).
The top positions, on the other hand, are firmly in English
hands: the first place went to Peter Barnes, director of the National Heart and Lung Institute at the Imperial College in London
(which incidentally brought four more of its researchers into the
“Top 30”). He was followed by Stephen Holgate, Southampton, in
second place and David Strachan, London, in fourth. All three are
mainly asthma specialists but with each one taking a different approach: Barnes combines basic and clinical research into asthma
therapy, Holgate investigates the immunology of asthma, whereas Strachan studies its epidemiological aspects.
Gerald Simonneau, Paris, and Werner Seeger, Gießen, in
places three and seven, respectively, head the group of pulmonary hypertension specialists in the list, whereas Heinz Wichmann (5th) and Erika von Mutius (6th), both Munich, also add to
the expectedly strong performance of asthma researchers.
Wichmann, however, also highlights a certain “problem”. Being an epidemiologist, he only achieved a part of his papers with
studies on asthma or other airway diseases, whilst also publishing on tumour or cardiovascular diseases. Similar cases are not
only provided by other epidemiologists but also by some allergologists – like, for example, Ulrich Wahn (Berlin, 12th) who published about half-and-half on asthma and allergic skin diseases.
Seen this way, there might indeed be a few oranges in the apRalf Neumann
ple basket!
Articles appearing between 1998 and 2009 in ‘Respiratory System’ journals as listed by Thomson Reuter’s Web of Science. The
citation numbers are accurate as of February 2011. A country’s
figures are derived from articles where at least one author working in the respective European nation is included in the author’s
list. Israel is included because it is a member of many European
research organisations and programmes (EMBO, FP7 of the EU...).
... and the World
Citations
Articles
Cit./Art.
Europe
597,239
53,898
11.1
USA
Canada
Japan
Australia
China
Brazil
583,784
114,219
79,497
47,912
16,649
10,627
44,852
7,146
8,345
3,346
1,838
1,180
13.0
16.0
9.5
14.3
9.1
9.0
page 44
Lab Times
Ranking
2-2011
Publication Analysis 1998-2009 – Respiratory System
Most Cited Authors...
Cit- Artations icles
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
Peter J. Barnes, Natl. Heart & Lung Inst. Imperial Coll. London
Stephen T. Holgate, Infect. Inflammat. & Immun. Univ. Southampton
Gerald Simonneau, Pneumol. Hosp. Ant. Béclère Univ. Paris-Sud
David P. Strachan, Epidemiol. St. Georges Hosp. Univ. London
Heinz-E. Wichmann, Epidemiol. Helmholtz Ctr. Munich
Erika von Mutius, Dr. v. Haunersches Children’s Hosp. Univ. Munich
Werner Seeger, Internal Med. Univ. Giessen
Kian Fan Chung, Natl. Heart & Lung Inst. Imperial Coll. London
Marc Humbert, Pneumol. Hosp. Ant. Béclère Univ. Paris-Sud
Dirkje S. Postma, Pulm. Dis. Univ. Med. Ctr. Groningen
Antoni Torres, Pneumol. & Allergia Resp. Hosp. Clin. Barcelona
Ulrich Wahn, Pneumol. & Immunol. Univ. Child. Hosp. Charité Berlin
Jean Bousquet, Serv. Malad. Resp. Hosp. A. Villeneuve Montpellier
William MacNee, Inflammat. Res. Queens Med. Inst. Edinburgh
Stephen R. Durham, Natl. Heart & Lung Inst. Imperial Coll. London
Joachim Heinrich, Epidemiol. Helmholtz Ctr. Munich
Friedrich Grimminger, Lung Ctr. Univ. Giessen
Romain A. Pauwels, Resp. Dis. State Univ. Ghent Hosp. († 2005)
Kurt Blaser, Swiss Inst. Allergy & Asthma Res. Davos
Bert Brunekreef, Environm. Epidemiol. Fac. Med. Univ. Utrecht
Emiel F.M. Wouters, Resp. Med. Univ. Hosp. Maastricht
Peter M.A. Calverley, Resp. Med. Sch. Clin. Sci. Univ. Liverpool
Ian M. Adcock, Natl. Heart & Lung Inst. Imperial Coll. London
Christian Manegold, Thoracic Oncol. Univ. Med. Ctr. Mannheim
Ulrich Keil, Epidemiol. & Social Med. Univ. Munster
Andrew G. Nicholson, Histopathol. Royal Brompton Hosp. London
Cezmi A. Akdis, Swiss Inst. Allergy & Asthma Res. Davos
Klaus F. Rabe, Pulmonol. Leiden Univ. Med. Ctr.
Jørgen Vestbo, Resp. Med. Univ.’s Copenhagen & Manchester
Joachim von Pawel, Pneumol. Oncol. Asklepios Hosp. Munich-Gauting
... and Papers
26,476
14,123
13,213
12,814
12,489
12,188
10,031
8,927
8,806
8,331
8,213
8,011
7,705
7,668
7,651
7,595
7,540
7,286
7,285
7,268
6,903
6,728
6,660
6,569
6,534
6,226
6,215
5,979
5,954
5,844
470
312
176
158
344
180
339
223
207
295
253
226
273
115
150
277
239
128
138
218
211
97
147
124
91
173
129
161
108
61
Peter Barnes(1.)
Stephen Holgate (2.)
Gerald Simonneau (3.)
Erika von Mutius (6.)
Werner Seeger (7.)
Dirkje Postma (10.)
Antoni Torres (11.)
Jørgen Vestbo (29.)
Citations of articles published between 1998 and 2009
were recorded up until Feb 2011 using the Web of Science
database from Thomson Reuters. The “most cited papers”
had correspondence addresses in Europe or Israel.
1. Leckie, MJ; ten Brinke, A; Khan, J; [...]; Chung, KF; Djukanovic, R; Hansel, TT; Holgate, T; Sterk, PJ; Barnes, PJ
Effects of an interleukin-5 blocking monoclonal antibody on eosinophils, airway hyper-responsiveness, and the late asthmatic
response. LANCET, 356 (9248): 2144-2148 DEC 23 2000
2. Braun-Fahrlander, C; Riedler, J; Herz, U; [...]; Renz, H; Nowak, D; von Mutius, E
Environmental exposure to endotoxin and its relation to asthma in school-age children.
NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF MEDICINE, 347 (12): 869-877 SEP 19 2002
3. lschewski, H; Simonneau, G; Galie, N; [...]; Ewert, R; Siedentop, H; Seeger, W
Inhaled iloprost for severe pulmonary hypertension.
NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF MEDICINE, 347 (5): 322-329 AUG 1 2002
4. Seemungal, TAR; Donaldson, GC; Paul, EA; Bestall, JC; Jeffries, DJ; Wedzicha, JA
Effect of exacerbation on quality of life in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF RESPIRATORY AND CRITICAL CARE MEDICINE, 157 (5): 1418-1422 MAY 1998
5. Galie, N; Ghofrani, HA; Torbicki, A; [...]; Grimminger, F; Kurzyna, M; Simonneau, G
Sildenafil citrate therapy for pulmonary arterial hypertension.
NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF MEDICINE, 353 (20): 2148-2157 NOV 17 2005
Citations
724
672
543
520
519