An analysis of publications in the field of molecular genetics & genomics from 1997 to 2008 has named a Nucleic Acids Research journal article on Clustal X as the most cited paper and its author, Conway Fellow, Professor Des Higgins as the 4th most cited author.
The study carried out by the European life sciences journal, Lab Times looked at articles that appeared in 116 expert journals in this field as listed by the Thomson Reuter database, Web of Science.
Although Germany and England dominated the rankings for the highest numbers of molecular genetics & genomics articles and citations, Ireland scooped the accolade for the highest number of citations per article – ‘small but impressive Ireland’ according to Lab Times. On average, each article with at least one Irish co-author has been cited 61 times up to June 2010. Second and third place in this category went to Switzerland (44.4) and England (41.1).
Des Higgins is Professor of Bioinformatics at UCD School of Medicine & Medical Science and UCD Conway Institute. His Clustal computer programme is widely used in molecular biology for aligning sets of related protein or DNA (or RNA) sequences together.
