Palmer among 15 top researchers in field

By Jayne Spencer

Huffman

Broxmeyer

Hites

ISI will honor the top 15 scientists in the fields of plant and animal science, and of agriculture, at a Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology meeting on “Translating the Genome” April 20-24 in New Orleans. Some 14,000 biomedical researchers are expected to be in attendance. ISI Essential Science Indicators (ESI) is a new evaluation tool that was used to identify the top researchers. The method to identify top researchers is based on total citations to research papers from 1991 through November 2001. ISI Essential Science Indicators permits users to rank the performance of scientists, institutions (universities, corporations, government laboratories), countries and journals in 22 specific fields.

Palmer will join a number of IU colleagues identified as top players in their particular fields in a number of online research tools.

A March “Hot Paper” is by Dr. T.K. Li of the IU School of Medicine (IUSM) and explores issues of genetics and alcoholism. Chemist John Huffman, director of the IU Molecular Structure Center in Bloom-ington, and Ron Hites, Distinguished Professor of public and environmental affairs, are featured on ISIHighlyCited.com, a free, online gateway to the world’s most cited and influential scientific authors.

Last September’s “InCite” section featured institutional excellence in the area of immunology, with an interview with Hal Broxmeyer, chairman of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at IUSM. Comparing citations from immunology publications coming out of IU from the years 1990-94 with those from 1995-99, citations increased from 524 to 1,540, with the total number of publications increasing from 114 to 220. ESI data at that time showed that IU had 300 papers, with a total of 4,237 citations to its credit in immunology. Broxmeyer provided some online insight into the dramatic rise in the university’s contribution to the field of immunology and related areas of clinical and basic research.