The 2008 Nobel Prizes in Medicine: In a Great Year for Virology in Particular, Would You Have Had The Journals They Needed?
The choices for recipients of the 2008 Nobel Prizes in Medicine or Physiology are among the most universally acclaimed as being judiciously decided, directly important to human health, richly deserved, and if anything else worth noting, long overdue.
The focus this year was clearly on viruses directly linked to illnesses that affect millions of people.
A team of Parisians, Francoise Barre-Sinoussi of the Pasteur Institute (France’s equivalent of the NIH) and Luc Montagnier (formerly of the Pasteur Institut and currently of the World Foundation for AIDS Research and Prevention, also in Paris) won for the discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus.
Harald zur Hausen of the German Cancer Research Center won for his discovery of the human papilloma viruses causing cervical cancer.
As is the custom with this blog and the Nobel Laureates, we will analyze the journals within which they published and ask ourselves if we, as information professionals, would have been able to be supply their needs from our own library’s resources.
This year we are using the Web of Science to compile this snapshot analysis, but would expect similar results in terms of percentages of papers in given categories of biomedical journals with PubMed, Biological Abstracts, Scopus , Excerpta Medica, and other databases that include a substantial representation of biomedical research journals.
Any differences would be largely owing to the number of journals covered, and in the depth to which individual authors in papers with very long strings of authors remain credited with given papers. (Some databases drop off authors after a given number. )
Francoise Barre-Sinoussi
Francoise Barre-Sinoussi has published most often (18 papers) in The Lancet, but otherwise does not appear primarily in the leading journals of general clinical investigation.
She has had 3 papers in the Bulletin de l’Academie Nationale de Medicine, 2 papers each in the Annals of Internal Medicine, and the New England Journal of Medicine, and single papers in the American Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and the Journal of Clinical Investigation, plus a scattering of single papers in other less well known journals of this type.
Her clearest emphasis has been on journals of virology and retroviruses.
She has 17 papers in AIDS Research & Human Retroviruses, and 10 papers in the journal now published as Microbes & Infection ( but formerly variously known as Annales de L’Institut Pasteur – Virology , Annales de Virologie , and Research in Virology).
She has 6 papers in Virology, 5 papers in AIDS, and 4 papers in the Journal of Virology.
Barre-Sinoussi has 2 in the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes & Human Retrovirology. She has single but highly characteristic articles in Acta Virologica, AIDS Research, Journal of General Virology, Journal of Virological Methods, and in Progress in Medical Virology.
Not too surprisingly her next most characteristic category of outlets are journals in general microbiology, immunology, and infectious diseases: all of which routinely include papers on virology.
She has 3 papers each in the Journal of Immunology, the Journal of Infectious Diseases, and Lymphology.
She has a single paper each in the American Journal of Epidemiology, Clinical and Experimental Immunology, Diagnostic & Clinical Immunology, FEMS Immunology & Medical Microbiology, Journal of Interferon Research, Medecine et Maladies Infectieuses, and finally Veterinary Microbiology.
While there are 47 other journals within which she has also published, we focus last on the major multiscience journals. They figure into the CVs of virtually all Nobel Laureates in Medicine, and Barre-Sinoussi is no exception.
She has had at least 9 papers in Science including her most cited (4,390 citations), 7 papers in Nature including her second most cited ( 2014 citations) as well as three papers in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which while respectably cited, are not in the same citation earning league in her case.
Her two papers in Cell are by contrast, particularly heavily cited (516 and 416 citations, respectively).
This is once again confirmation that Cell has become as much of a king-making journal as any of the major multi-science journals or major journals of general clinical investigation.
Luc Montagnier
Not too surprisingly, given that he co-authored a number of papers with Barre-Sinoussi, The Lancet was also the most frequent outlet for the work of Luc Montagnier (29 papers).
He has had at least double her number of papers in other journals of this type, including 6 in the New England Journal of Medcine, 5 in Presse Medicale , and 3 respectively, in the Annals of Internal Medicine, and the Journal of Experimental Medicine (arguably the general clinical investigation title with the strongest emphasis on immunology).
There were also notable single papers in JAMA and Nature Medicine .
Montagnier also has a strong concentration of papers in journals of virology and retroviruses.
AIDS Research & Human Retroviruses leads the pack with 23 papers, tied with the journal now known as Microbes & Infection, (formed by the merger of three journals of virology as noted earlier).
These are followed by the Journal of Virology with 13, Virology with 11, and AIDS with 10.
The Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes & Human Retrovirology comes next with 5 papers.
Intervirology and the Journal of General Virology have four papers each.
The Journal of Virological Methods has two papers.
Other journals with a strong component of virology, such as those in general microbiology, infectious diseases, and immunology are quite prominent.
Infection & Immunity has 7 papers, while the Journal of Infectious Diseases has 6.
Journals with two papers each include the European Journal of Immunology, Immunobiology, Immunology Today, the Journal of Immunology, Molecular Immunology and Vaccine.
Among the 104 other journals featuring a single papers, the essays in the Annual Review of Immunology and the Annual Review of Microbiology are arguably the most important.
Montagnier has somewhat more papers (55) in the multiscience journals than does Barre-Sinoussi, but a good number of these are in fact co-authored with her.
His most famous papers in Science (4390 citations), Nature (2014), and Cell (516 and 416) were joint efforts with her.
This was also the case with an important methods paper in Virology ( 1255 citations.)
What distinguishes Montagnier from Barre-Sinoussi most is perhaps a greater interest in viruses and cancer, with Montagnier having 10 papers in the Bulletin du Cancer and , 4 in the International Journal of Cancer.
This observation forms a perfect bridge to the work of a man who has built his career on proving this causative connection in a manner that has already resulted in a preventive vaccine.
Harald zur Hausen
Today over 30,000,000 teenage girls are being greatly, if not yet perfectly, protected against cervical cancer by vaccines which set the body’s immune defenses on alert against an assortment of human papilloma viruses, which are now known to be the primary cause of this disease.
This progress is due largely to the dogged determination of Harald zur Hausen of the German Cancer Research Center in Heidelberg.
One reason for the difficulty that zur Hausen had in convincing his colleagues that microbes such as viruses could cause cancer lies in the fact that in 1926, a Danish researcher, Johannes Andreas Grib Fibiger was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine for announcing (in good faith, but with evidence that would be later overturned by new advances) that a microorganism that he termed, Spiroptera carcinoma, caused cancer.
Since no fraud whatsoever was suspected of Fibiger, he got to retain his medal and the money, but the Nobel committee was clearly wary of awarding a second mistaken Nobel Prize on a similar germ-cancer connection claim.
The 8,653 citation to zur Hausen’s articles apparently changed their minds.
Zur Hausen’s favorite outlets clearly display the dual themes of viruses and cancer that made up his life’s work.
He has 20 papers in Virology, 16 in the title now known as the International Journal of Medical Microbiology (formerly the Zentralblatt ) , and 12 in the Journal of Virology.
The oncology side is represented most prominently by the International Journal of Cancer (15 ), Cancer Research (7) and the Journal of the National Cancer Institute (3).
Despite the importance of his findings to everyday medicine, zur Hausen has not often appeared in the major journals of general clinical investigation. The Muchener Medizinische Wochemschrift and Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift are certainly respectable, but not of as great an impact as their English language competitors.
Zur Hausen’s greatest hits, however, are all written in English, and in a change from his fellow laureates this year, his two most cited papers come from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (1440 & 744 citations, respectively.
Then comes Nature (in third place with 688 citations) and Science (in 5th place with 485).
Fourth place is highly instructive. A reviews section of the pioneering post-WWII multinational journal in biochemistry, Biochimica et Biophysica Acta (v.1288 no.2, :pgs.f55-f78) garnered 668 citations.
In many ways, it was the most expansive expression of his principal theory: "Papillomavirus infections: A major cause of human cancers.”
Like Montagnier, he also published a major survey of his specialty in the Annual Review of Microbiology.
It is perhaps indicative of zur Hausen’s need to present his case systematically, over and over again, to a skeptical audience, that his dossier contain arguably the highest proportion of survey and tutorial papers of any of this year’s laureates.
One of every seven of his articles are major reviews.
Not only are some of the journals previously mentioned venues for these expositions, but so are these: Advances in Cancer Research, BioEssays, the Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology, Current Topics in Microbiology & Immunology, European Journal of Cancer, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, Nature Reviews Cancer, Oncogene, and Seminars in Cancer Biology.
A Tribute to the Librarians Behind the Laureates
I am about 4 journals short of having everything cited here, a result that is admittedly made easier by the electronic access sharing of my flagship Fayetteville campus of the University of Arkansas , with the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences library in Little Rock, some 150 miles away.
That kind of cooperation is made largely possible by administrators above my pay grade signing agreements with publishers and vendors on behalf of each institution’s faculty and students.
Good as that oversight is, we must give even greater honor to the librarians in France and Germany in the pre-electronic age when the careers of these Nobel Prizewinners kicked into high gear.
Those librarians somehow managed to acquire, organize, and facilitate the use of print resources for these scientists, particularly the journals which have always consumed the lion’s share of any biomedical library’s budget.
So on behalf of all the people with AIDS, or those lucky enough to have avoided it, and for all the women who will not now get cervical cancer, and in memory of all who died of it, we thank the librarians behind the laureates.
You made part of this progress possible. You make us proud to be librarians.
Tony Stankus tstankus@uark.edu Life Sciences Librarian & Professor
University of Arkans Libraries MULN 233 E
365 North McIlroy Avenue
Fayetteville, AR 72701-4002
Voice; 479-409-0021
Fax: 479-575-4592
Greetings from a fellow librarian.
Actually I am a young adult librarian, but I still can appreciate your work. Sometimes I help friends in information searching. What I wanted to say is that I am quite impressed by your professional work.
With respect
A. Weiler
Posted by: Abie Weiler | October 17, 2008 at 12:24 AM