This year, Elizabeth Blackburn (University of California at San Francisco Medical School), Carol Greider (The Johns Hopkins University Medical School) and Jack Szostak (Massachusetts General Hospital of the Harvard University Medical School) were voted the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine by a committee of medical faculty experts at the Karolinska Institute (effectively the Scandinavian equivalent of any of the three preceding institutions) in Sweden.
Also this year, Venkataraman Ramakrishnan (Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, essentially the equivalent of the US NIH), Thomas Steitz (Yale University), and Ada Yonath (Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, much like Caltech or MIT in the US), were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry), for work on ribosomes, a component of cells that is essential to the construction of proteins. In many respects, this prize could just as easily been awarded in the Physiology or Medicine category, given its strong molecular and cellular biology emphasis.
Where Nobel Laureates have published is important information for librarians who must buy journals, very often with very limited dollars, because they represent a kind of endorsement of the best journals in the world, as expressed by the best scientists in the world.
Consider that, after a probationary stint as a junior scientist in someone else’s lab where they did not make such important decisions, each Nobel Laureate, in their mature careers as heads of their own labs, voted with every manuscript as to which journals they regarded as being not only the most subject-appropriate, but the most influential among the most subject-appropriate ones.
In 2009, another panel of experts also cast votes. This time it was not about who would be this year’s Nobel Prizewinners, but rather which were the 100 most influential journals, in this case, of the last 100 years in biology and medicine.
These expert voters were the members of the BioMedical & Life Sciences Division (the DBIO) of the larger (11,000 member) Special Libraries Association (SLA). This was done on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of SLA. The editors and publishers of their journals were feted in a banquet in Washington DC, where they were applauded by the very librarians that had voted in their publications. To see this “DBIO 100” list, click on http://units.sla.org/division/dbio/publications/resources/dbio100.html
From this list, a Top Ten Journals category and the single Journal of the Centennial were also selected: http://units.sla.org/division/dbio/publications/resources/topten.html
To what degree did the choices made by the Nobel Laureates and the choices for the DBIO 100, the Top Ten, and the Journal of the Centennial, made by some of the best and brightest among biomedical librarians coincide?
This blog will provide some answers.
Two words of warning.
First, the DBIO 100 Poll conducted by these librarian deliberately excluded journals that were predominantly devoted to review articles (e.g. The Annual Reviews series), to paragraph-sized summaries of conference presentations (e.g. Abstracts of Papers Presented to the American Chemical Society), or to experimental procedures and laboratory protocols (e.g. Methods in Enzymology and Related Areas of Molecular Biology).
Second, the DBIO 100 Poll was deliberately designed to include journals in all areas of biology and medicine. This means that at least 34 titles covering Natural History topics ( including four of the Top Ten, viz., the American Journal of Botany, the Journal of Zoology, the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, and the Journal of Paleontology ) would be clearly out of scope for these Nobel Laureates. Even many of the 33 winners in the Clinical Group, would seem odd venues (e.g. AJN: The American Journal of Nursing, the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, the Journal of the American Dental Association, etc.) given that the Nobel Prizes in Physiology and Medicine, and in Chemistry, have overwhelmingly stressed molecular and cellular biology in recent decades.
In a sense, only the 33 journals in the DBIO 100’s Molecular & Cellular group were reasonably likely venues for this year’s s Nobel prizewinners, although a limited amount of crossover to some clinical journals remained a possibility.
The question then becomes how can we measure the performance of these 33 expert-librarian-selected journals, against a more comprehensive (and at least ten times more expensive) list that would contain virtually all the titles in which the laureates would be likely to publish?
The Thomson Reuter 2008, JCR, Journal Citation Reports, (the JCR for short) a particularly authoritative guide to the journals of greatest consequence in the sciences and other fields, lists several hundred journals in areas related to the fields we will discuss. (There are 728 listed in the combined categories, although given that there is some duplication in titles appearing on more than one category list, a more reasonable estimate would be 600).
The JCR certainly includes every one of the 33 DBIO 100 titles in the pertinent areas, and It would presumably contain all the journals of this year’s laureates, making for a good comparison set, even though there are doubtlessly even larger, but less discriminating lists, that would cost an order of magnitude even more than that of the JCR.
Journals of General Science
Arguably the hardest journals in which to get a paper published are Science, Nature, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Given that these scientists were doing Nobel Prize-worthy work, it may not be that great a surprise that despite the hurdles any author faces in the process of gaining a manuscript acceptance there, each of these journals played a prominent role in the output of the five of the six laureates.
Nature was the most common outlet for Szostak, but appeared in the list of publications for five of the six. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences was the most common outlet for Blackburn, and second most common for Greider and Steitz, and appeared in the top 5 for Yonath. Finally in the cv’s of five of the six, Science made at least one appearance (but usually many more).
How did the DBIO panel of expert voters rank these titles? All three made the Top Ten, and Nature was named the Most Influential Journal of the Century.
So far, so good for the DBIO100 voters.
Journal of General Biology & General Clinical Investigation
The first of these two categories, General Biology, included those journals which cover a rather broad spectrum of biology, as opposed to focusing on a particular topic, such as genetics or ecology. The DBIO voters named three winners: The FASEB (Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology) Journal , Current Biology, and the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B Biological Sciences.
The second category, General Clinical Investigation, included four journals that made the DBIO 100, the first three of which also made the Top Ten. These were the New England Journal of Medicine, the BMJ: British Medical Journal, JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, and The Lancet.
Was the DBIO 100 voting in one or both of these more general categories reflected in the publications lists of the laureates?
While they were by no means in the dominant position of the three titles above, The FASEB Journal was included by four laureates (Blackburn, Greider, Steitz & Szostak), while two laureates (Blackburn and Greider) had papers in Current Biology.
The fact that the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B Biological Sciences was not among the choices of any of the six might be best explained by the fact that it includes proportionally more biology of the Natural History type, than do the other two.
Only one journal of general clinical investigation made the lists of any of the laureates. Both Blackburn and Greider have appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, which is the title among the four in this group, which most notably makes a point of taking a select number of basic science papers of potential clinical importance on a fairly regular basis.
Journals of Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, Genetics
Among the titles most commonly favored by this year’s laureates are Biochemistry (particularly by Szostak, but also included by Steitz and Yonath ), the Journal of Biological Chemistry (Blackburn , Greider, Ramakrishnan & Steitz), Biochimica et Biophysica Acta (Steitz & Yonath), the Journal of Molecular Biology ( the favorite of both Steitz and Yonath, but included by all the laureates), EMBO (European Molecular Biology Organization) Journal (all six again), Molecular & Cellular Biology (Blackburn, Greider & Szostak) ), Nucleic Acids Research (Blackburn, Greider, Steitz & Szostak) and Nature Structural and Molecular Biology (The favorite title of Ramakrishnan in recent years, but also included by Blackburn & Szostak). Blackburn, Greider & Szostak published in Genetics. In addition, Greider appeared in Nature Genetics.
Each and every one of these journals had been voted in by the DBIO before the laureates themselves had been so honored.
Cell Biology
The leading journals of Cell Biology as chosen by DBIO 100 voters were Cell, by a massive margin over its nearest competitor, the Journal of Cell Biology.
Cell was the highest ranking journal of cell biology in the output of all six laureates; the Journal of Cell Biology figured only in the record of Blackburn.
However, conspicuously absent from the DBIO 100 was another title clearly favored by Blackburn, the Molecular Biology of the Cell, now the official title of the American Society for Cell Biology, an organization of which she was president in 1998. This title broke away from Rockefeller University’s venerable and DBIO 100-voted Journal of Cell Biology, which used to be published on the Society’s behalf. But the elder title has thrived despite the establishment of the newer rival Molecular Biology of the Cell, nonetheless.
Other Journals in Common Between the Laureates and the DBIO 100 Voters
Steitz and Yonath both published in the Journal of Bacteriology, while Blackburn & Grieder both appeared in Blood. Steitz alone published in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, while only Blackburn appeared in the journal Gastroenterology. In none of these cases is it likely that these forays are core to their ongoing work.
What Were The Success Rates Of The 33 DBIO 100 Titles In Identifying The Journals That Mattered Most To The Nobel Laureates This Year?
Journal Citation Reports included almost all the journals that published papers by our laureates. (It did miss some laureate papers that fell in the JCR’s General Chemistry and Organic Chemistry categories, but these categories were not covered at all in the DBIO 100 poll, and therefore out of scope for a fair comparison). But overall, the JCR performed splendidly.
In other words, a selective assortment of 600+ journals, proved likely to contain almost 100% of the journals within which this year’s class of Laureates published.
But how well did the DBIO 33 of the DBIO 100 journal set ----an assortment that was essentially only about 5 % of that of JCR in numbers, fare?
In other words, if 600 carefully selected journals from the JCR = 100% of Nobel Laureate output, what proportion of output was covered by a list only about %5 as long?
Statistics suggest that the DBIO 5% should predict about 5%.
The results, however, were quite extraordinary.
Subject to the exclusionary rules mentioned earlier, the DBIO 100’s “33” accounted for 49% of the papers of Szostak & Yonath; 53% of the papers of Blackburn; 83% of the papers of Ramakrishnan; 90% of the papers of Greider, and 91% of those of Szostak.
Eighteen DBIO member-voted titles out of the 33 DBIO member-voted titles in the original comparison set, plus the five more clinical and more occasional DBIO member-voted titles ( a total of 23 titles) accounted for a group average of 69% of the Nobel Laureates output this year.
It seems that Nobel Prizewinners know where to go with their papers, and there they will find SLA’s DBIO librarians, despite having very little money with which to work in more and more cases, at the ready with a majority of the titles that matter the most to their careers.
It seems that SLA’s DBIO librarians know how to pick them too.
Tony Stankus, FSLA, [email protected], Life Sciences Librarian, Professor & Science Coordinator
University of Arkansas Libraries MULN 233 E
365 North McIlroy Avenue
Fayetteville AR 72701-4002
Voice: 479-409-0021
Fax: 479-409-0021
Comments