April 2009  (from the Apr. 30, Thom­son Reuters Newsletter)

Sci­ence Watch takes its annual look back at the hottest of recent research.

Sci­ence Watch from Thom­son Reuters tracks trends and per­for­mance in basic research year-round. In this highly antic­i­pated annual review, it iden­ti­fies researchers who accounted for the high­est num­bers of Hot Papers pub­lished over the pre­ced­ing two years from 2008. It also high­lights which papers pub­lished dur­ing 2008 were the most cited by year’s end.

Kuo-Chen Chou of the Gor­don Life Sci­ences Insti­tute and Shang­hai Jiao Tong Uni­ver­sity tops the Hot Paper rank­ings, with 17 pub­lished since 2007 cov­er­ing a vari­ety of sequenc­ing tools for pre­dict­ing pro­tein loca­tion. Thir­teen of these reports were co-authored with another of the fea­tured sci­en­tists, Hong-Bin Shen.

The list of 2008’s most-cited papers is strik­ing for the promi­nence of physical-sciences reports in the top spots—especially those on iron-based super­con­duc­tors, a topic that accounts for the num­ber one paper and three oth­ers in the top ten. The­o­ret­i­cal physics, and specif­i­cally string the­ory, also reg­is­ters strongly, with sev­eral papers exam­in­ing recent refine­ments to M-theory.

The hottest research of 2007-08: read the full analysis